Seventeen by Booth Tarkington

I read Tarkington's Penrod novels when I was a young lad, but I never got around to reading Seventeen. Perhaps that was because I was less than 17 at the time. Now I have taken the plunge, and I loved it. 

Contemporary readers will find that Seventeen is written in an old-fashioned style, which is not surprising since it was published in 1916. It revolves around a 17-year-old boy who is infatuated with Lola Pratt (great name!), a stranger who visits his small Midwest town for the summer. 

The book has a major flaw in that it depicts black people in ways that are unacceptable by today's standards. But so did Huckleberry Finn. For my part, I was willing to endure what some will find offensive because Tarkington, like Twain, is simply a superb writer.  Tarkington does a fine job of depicting teenage angst in a way that one has to live through to understand. His descriptions of William's feelings for the young lady who has stolen his heart are spot on. I could cite any number of examples, but one will suffice. Describing William's heartache: 

"Alas! he considered his sufferings a new invention in the world... he passed through phases of emotion which would have kept an older man busy for weeks and left him wrecked at the end of them." (p. 186)

One of my favorite scenes is set at a party at which William struggles to get one single dance with Lola. Here the book is completely detached from today's world. Teenagers dance to live music supplied by "Italians with harp, violin and flute, promising great things for dancing on a fresh-clipped lawn" (p. 195). William's rival is indisposed (vomiting, as it would be called today), giving our hero the opportunity he has been waiting for all night:

"Then gaily tinkled harp, gaily sang flute and violin! Over the greensward William lightly bore his lady, while radiant was the clear sky above the happy dancers. William's fingers touched those delicate fingers; the exquisite face smiled rosily up to him; the undreamable sweetness beat rhythmically upon his glowing ears; his feet moved in a rhapsody of companionship with hers....So passed the long, ineffable afternoon away - ah, Seventeen!" (p. 201)

It takes a special breed of reader to plow through 324 pages of this sort of writing. But I am that reader. Call me old-fashioned if you will. 

N.B. Seventeen was originally a series of "sketches" appearing in Metropolitan Magazine, later collected and published in novel form in 1916. It was the best-selling novel of the year in 1916,  the second consecutive year in which Tarkington headed the best-seller list, preceded in 1915 by his novel The Turmoil.