Fiction writer Justin Kramon, Park School '98, gives his alma mater lavish credit for fostering student creativity and independence. But on the phone from Philadelphia, where he now lives, he says he didn't meet a professional writer until "I was, like, 20."
Current Park School students are far luckier. Kramon returns in the fall to conduct workshops and deliver a talk as the academy's 2010 Writer in Residence. (The school began its visiting-writers program in 2004; 2009's guest litterateur was poet and essayist Andrei Codrescu.)
Kramon will be arriving with a wind at his back from his first novel, "Finny," due out Tuesday from Random House. It's set partly in Baltimore County, where he grew up.
Kramon wants his time at Park School to be "a fun way for students to be exposed to someone doing something in the outside world. What does a writer do all day? How do you make a career telling stories about people?"
For Kramon, that career has been going full-force. His short stories have appeared in prestigious publications, including Boulevard and TriQuarterly, and have won foundation prizes and awards. "Finny" is a big step forward. It carries praise from novelists such as Jim Crace and John Burnhma Schwartz; Crace calls it, among other things, "Dickensian in its span and generosity."
Imagine combining the human panoply of " David Copperfield" with the cutting colloquial wisdom of "The Catcher in the Rye,' whose hero famously derided "all that David Copperfield kind of crap." Kramon serves up this unlikely blend with oddball humor and Maryland flavor of his own.
The book's spiky 14-year-old heroine, Finny Short, rebels against her mother's social forms and her father's intellectual stuffiness. She finds a suitable scope for her dreams, Kramon writes, "in the area of rolling farmland just west of Interstate 83, just south of the Pennsylvania line. The Shorts' home sat on a hill, and from the back windows you could see the whole scoop of the valley where they lived: cornfields, clusters of trees, horse pastures, all threaded with fences and gravel driveways, dotted with big manorish houses. It looked to Finny, from her bedroom window, like a huge gaudy quilt."
In the unexpected magic of this setting Finny meets a spiritually generous boy named Earl. Over the course of two decades, in Baltimore, Paris and New York, Earl's love challenges, softens and strengthens Finny, sometimes simultaneously. "Finny" is the rare authentic coming-of-age novel. The protagonist matures without losing her sparkle. Her view of people changes as she adds new facets to the prism of her consciousness. The supporting characters also grow in unlikely and often heartening ways. Earl uses his gift for building up his friends and family to become a fiction writer. His father, a narcoleptic pianist, ultimately makes his condition part of a crowd-pleasing concert act.
Kramon says he wanted the book's atmosphere to be "full of possibility." And he knew he could root this sense of imminence in the story's Maryland locales. "There was just a feeling of both loneliness and beauty to the landscape there," says Kramon — making it just the right place for an individualistic heroine to start spreading her wings. The "spaciousness" that Kramon finds in Baltimore County gives Finny room to escape her sometimes claustrophobic family. And the area's open-ended ambience aids the novelist's quest to layer humor with high drama. "Having comedy next to tragedy," he muses, "to me that emphasizes both."
Kramon, now 29, says interviewers often ask him why he chose to center a novel on a teenage girl. "It partly has to do with the type of writing that I want to do and the kind of writer I want to be. I like to step outside of myself in my writing. I think the heart of fiction is really sympathy: seeing the world through other people's eyes. It's what gives a sense of beauty and largeness to a work."
After all, Kramon says, he spends much of his day with his fiancee or his female relatives and friends, discussing or just wondering about what goes on in their heads. But he also acknowledges that "something about writing from the female point of view cuts through things about the male point of view that have always bothered me and that I could never articulate."
Finny and her older brother, Sylvan, grow attached (in very different ways) to a blonde bombshell named Judith. She travels in rarefied circles in Manhattan, filled with young men whose stylishness or aggression can't remedy or even mask deep, unspoken insecurities. But they're not the only self-destructive and pretentious souls. Judith is a fascinating portrait of an image-conscious yet also reckless female, who isn't above using what used to be called "feminine wiles." Indeed, part of what connects Kramon to Finny is that "Finny cuts through people's pretensions," male or female. "That's something I hugely admire. In that way she is a better version of myself."
The book overflows with bits transformed from Kramon's own experiences. After Park School, Kramon attended Swarthmore, 11 miles southwest of Philadelphia. (Finny goes to a college in Philadelphia.) He spent summer vacations working at a homeless center in Boston. (Finny ends up teaching in Boston and living in Cambridge.) He was on duty at the homeless center at night; during the day he attended creative-writing classes at Harvard's extension school. (Sylvan goes to Harvard.) Kramon next entered the Iowa Writers' Workshop and earned his MFA. But it was really when he was on his own, like Earl, that he mastered his craft and found ways to express his point of view.
In a key episode in the book, Finny, Sylvan and their mother must select a coffin for Finny's father. A stout wife and string-bean husband run the funeral home. These opposites don't attract. They manage to funnel almost all the bad feeling generated by a dysfunctional marriage into a sneezing contest. While the shell-shocked and bereaved Short family tries to ponder a proper burial, this desiccated couple engages in an escalating series of snorts that drives them to exaggerated annoyance, disquiet or disgust.
This incident doesn't just illustrate Kramon's counterpoint of poignancy with farce. It also dramatizes his view of life as "great possibility poised against huge limitation. It's demonstrated by the selfishness of these two undertakers in the face of the other characters' loss. A lot of times, people are selfish or self-absorbed, unable to respond to what other people are going through. But by recasting it in literature, I am able, in a way, to bring an episode like that humor and optimism and a larger tone." The chapter ends with Finny and Sylvan achieving a rare sibling communion as they collapse into each other's arms with laughter and then tears.
Finny's on-and-off-and-on romantic history with Earl mirrors Kramon's relationship with his fiancee. "We met in college and dated for a short time; then I went to Iowa and she went to California. We happened to return to the East Coast at the same time. We restarted our relationship. I was working at a bookstore in Long Island, and she was working in Boston. I would drive up every weekend with this great sense of hopefulness; I would feel this great sense of despair every time I drove back. That was part of what I wanted to capture in this book."
Happily, there's nothing flossy about "Finny." To the shock of some advance reviewers, Finny experiences bad sex and casual sex, as well as romantic love, and Kramon describes it all, intimately.
"I'll only read the sex scenes at Park School," he says jokingly. Then he reconsiders. "I'm sure the students could handle it," he says. "I'm not sure I can."