Dead End in Norvelt (review)

In what promo copy describes as a mixture of “the entirely true and the wildly fictional,” Jack Gantos returns to a story of his childhood, or something like it. It’s summer vacation, and fictional Jack Gantos is grounded as a result of a problematic and unauthorized encounter with his father’s war souvenir, a Japanese rifle. His only approved offsite activity is his work for elderly Miss Volker, whose arthritis cripples her hands. That’s a much more exciting job than it sounds, however: Miss Volker is the official writer of obituaries for the newspaper and the unofficial historian of the small town of Norvelt, founded as a New Deal community and named for Eleanor Roosevelt; she’s also the medical examiner, and the town’s elderly are dropping at a rate that keeps her plenty busy with deaths as well as obits. There’s actually a murder mystery at the heart of all this, but the story is just as much focused on Jack’s burgeoning interest in history, his relentless susceptibility to nosebleeds, his uneasy seesawing between allying with his mother and his father, and his general capacity for performing weird yet comedic acts (his appearance as the Grim Reaper in a dying old lady’s house is a high-water mark). The book also offers a tribute to the real-life town of Norvelt and the communitarian spirit of its founding, the passing of which is decried by the political firebrand Miss Volker. This doesn’t roar like Gantos’ Joey Pigza tales; instead it’s a more quietly (but still absurdly) funny and insightful account of a kid’s growth, kin to Gantos’ Jack stories, that will stealthily hook even resistant readers into the lure of history.