The House Across the Street

by R.K. Byers

The book’s theme concerns a young adolescent boy growing up and discovering the world of sex and love. His success and failures result in his creating his own choices, sometimes against his own character leanings, often in accordance with his changing biology. During this period, he sporadically stands apart and examines what is happening as if out of time, analyzing its sense and nonsense from a different dimension.

The sociological and psychological implications alone make this book an exciting read, something akin to Carl Jung meeting Max Weber. In addition, the theological difficulties from the day take on a life of their own, explaining how some of us ended up where we are today. The philosophical issues of the day, too, take on a humorous new life in this seminal work. Whether you grew up in the age or not, boy or girl, it’s difficult not being able to walk next to him and understand oneself in a very new way.

Mr. Byers tells stories with the buoyancy of Thomas Wolfe, the subtle quirkiness of William Faulkner and the grace of Flannery O’Connor. Even in its heaviest moments, you never want to put the work down, caught as one is between wondering whether where it is headed and wishing it would go in another direction. Anyone curious about the sixties, especially how the era affected their beliefs as well as the present age, would enjoy reading this book.

588 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 26, 2019

About the author

Now I'm mad because I only wanted to change the pic of me as an author and keep the old pic of me as a book reader/critic. If it's not one thing... no, it's usually the one thing. Chronic dissatisfaction then laughing at myself for being chronically dissatisfied. I'll probably be pissed when I'm dead that there's not more to do.

Reviews

[Rhonda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was the best book I read in 2019. Every so often one comes across a writer who presents a topic, in this case, a young teen male in the 60's, and makes it about everything else. I shouldn't have even been moderately interested in this topic, but the way in which it was presented gave it universal appeal.
I remember at one point where the protagonist was standing outside his girlfriend's house on Christmas eve, essentially waiting to walk home, considering what had happened during the evening, how he should process any of it and what he was going to do. He hears the dead grass crunch beneath his feet and suddenly i was there, standing in the middle of the universe with no real direction, confused beyond understanding, staring up into the winter sky and feeling like a pawn on the chessboard to which I had not been given the rules. It is powerful writing and I wish I could express myself this well. The writing is simply superb.

In the first chapter, our protagonist, Michael, is sitting with a girl, not quite understanding what he is feeling or how to go about what he wants to do, probably very much like most early teens who feel pulled in contrary directions. He says,

I remember how, after listening to her tell me about the length of her skirt for about an hour and a half, she kissed me. It was a wonderful kiss and I wanted to do it more, believing the prelude of listening to things I didn’t understand was a one-time prelude to real teenaged action. If she had only stayed a bit longer, I might have figured out that there is always a prelude to kissing and to guys it is usually painful, usually of the unendurable variety. I became a hopeless romantic listening to songs in my basement about love. I knew there were two kinds, both lost and true, but in the latter case, I reasoned, I had Buddy Holly’s word that it would never die.

He doesn't understand any more of things than his girlfriend does, but he intuits something which is not only very interesting but probably true: making his girlfriend feel like she matters allows her to nurture her own feelings about him and, ditzy though it may have seemed, (and this is by no means an admission that women force men to listen to the most bizarre crap on the planet just because we need to talk about something that is of dire importance to us but of no interest whatsoever to anyone else,) when she feels comfortable with him, she immediately guides the issue to something in which he is actually interested, in this case, overwhelmingly so. It's funny, it's embarrassing, it's thought provoking and it's kind of magical, at least in the respect that most of what we ever do in the world seems to have this huge empty spot devoid of understanding in its middle.

Elsewhere the writer becomes somewhat more philosophical and it is clear that he is playing with ideas the way a cat chases a ball of yarn. During the second chapter of an adolescent looking to become a business tycoon and establish eternal freedom for himself, he observes,

Should the present generation persevere and create generations beyond itself, I predict that any rational being looking back on the age will deem that the reaction of humanity to almost any given situation was endowed not with rationality nor disorder, but only with art. In one respect Nietzsche was correct: we have created the super man, as he predicted, but he has a limp wrist.

I found myself laughing with tears running down my cheeks because it was not only an adolescent's view of how he was being treated by a hostile world, but that his observations hit home. These comments often seem to be spurious philosophy, but they are nothing of the sort. The author takes you down the back roads of scenic possibility, examining things casually, and then slams you head-on into a brick wall of undeniability. It's serious work to read this book, that is unless you just want to let him talk about ...life stuff. Personally I thought it was great...and best of all, it made me think and reevaluate.

In some ways, this is like a history of philosophy lesson, except I could not imagine having a professor this interesting while still taking him seriously. It is all too easy to allow things to zoom past and I had a feeling that the author was testing the readers in these things.
For God's sake, who would read Principia Mathematica when he was 16? (For that matter, who read Principia Ethica?) Who might have found it fascinating enough to continue past the first sections? But there is a trap involved, and I suggest that this is the author playing a game with self-determination and finitism. It reminds me of Socrates and his irony, some of those things that stop you and make you realize that you feel that someone knocked you head over heels.

He rolls the following out as if he were talking about some comic books.

In a stroke of luck, I came across some further writing on the theories of mathematics and started reading about a fellow named Kurt Gödel. He made an incredible discovery which I thought should be rolled over into daily living. He created something called the Incompleteness Theorem which stated, roughly, that within any reasonably rigid set of rules for a subject matter, there were always certain things within the system which couldn’t be proven from within the system of rules. You could always go outside the system and prove them, but then you would just end up with further things you couldn’t prove.
When I first read this, I was dumbfounded and it left me in a very deep funk for several days. I couldn’t believe at first that this man had managed to strike my heroes down in one magnificent blow. As I saw it, this theorem meant pretty much the same thing as turning around quickly in order to catch what was behind you: the problem was that once you turned, it wasn’t behind you any more!

I had never heard of Gödel until I was in graduate school and, had I had it explained this way, I might have understood its significance far sooner. One may object that the author is suggesting the applications are tongue in cheek, but I don't think he is. He is stating that if you can apply this to a given set of rules in life, you ought to give credit for someone either immersing rules in gibberish, or admit that there were rules outside whatever system of rules you developed that gave it credence.

I suppose the penultimate lesson of the book is one in which the author allows the protagonist to become lost in his own world, the rules changing and kicking him firmly in the face, so to speak. The incident is reminiscent of Jean Sheperd's Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories, although I do not know that the author intended this parallel. Still, the beauty here is how the author drags the protagonist through his own misery and attempts to ask whether what he believes should be thrown away or whether they are, in fact, rules for his own life in agony.

Indeed, some of the comments written toward the end aren't conclusions at all, but minor adaptations of life's lessons of adolescence. The great question is whether one has the fortitude to continue or just roll over and die. God knows that there are lots of reasons for the latter. What is fascinating isn't what happens to us, but how we react to it. It's equally funny how irrationally we make those decisions. Maybe we just become boring when we grow up, but reading this reminds one of all the impassioned things we did for the right and wrong reasons. It makes one cringe and it makes one laugh. Is there anything better?

I love this book, larger than what I wanted it to be, but worth every page when one get to the end, It left me feeling that it was a story that was larger than the story behind it. It was, so to speak, the frozen moment when we see what is on the end of our own fork...and that was worth the entire read ten times over. Best of all, it was like I was kind of teaching myself rather than having someone else tell you what to do. That should appeals to the rebel in all of us, but more than anything, how we never managed to ever properly mix hormones with our reasoning very well.