Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas, maybe’03. Idlewild is a small Quaker school on Fifteenth Street in Manhattan. Fifteenth, Sixteenth, who’s counting? It would be tempting to treat this novel as a roman a clef, and once in a while communal moments at Friends Seminary do poke through the fictional scrim. Who can forget the morning meeting when Raoul proposed to Dorothy before the astonished eyes of the entire upper school? This momentous vignette appears here and as in real life, the fictional fiancée says, “Yes.”
But this is rare and Idlewild is not a roman a clef. I understand that those who were at Friends Seminary at the time these events were unfolding at Idlewild will be tempted to look for equivalents. My advice is to read this book like any other novel, for its own story. The Friends Seminary experience is not disguised but rather imaginatively transformed into something new. Idlewild is every high school, that crucible we all went through, where we begin to take over defining who we are through angst, longing, confusion and relationships of such intensity that they hover over our whole lives.
Within this universal are very specific particulars. At the center of the book is the friendship between Nell and Fay, who take turns telling the story, except when their minds are so enmeshed that they fuse into one. Then they write together. Nell is an out Lesbian; Fay does not have her friend’s clarity about her own sexual identity. Her fantasy life runs toward images of gay men. Nell and Fay befriend two boys, whose relationship, somewhat mysterious, triggers the girls imaginations. If these boys are gender-nonconforming, that is not the most important thing about them. One of them, for all his charm, is a scary sociopath.
The book is filled with ferment. The trauma of 9/11 hangs over Nell and Fay. Nell, particularly, begins to understand her own role in a shockingly racist event at the school. Fay, a lifer, is not equipped to face the future and emerge from the warm cocoon of Idlewild. The school’s theater program, a somewhat safe haven, is also a center of competition and turmoil.
If you pick up this book, you are in for an engrossing read and for a trip back to your own teen years. Expect to wonder what became of those friends you used to know as second selves.
