Period 8 by Chris Crutcher (review)

Paulie loves his girlfriend Hannah, but that doesn’t mean he can resist his inclinations when Mary all but insists that they have sex one night. Riddled with guilt, Paulie confesses to Hannah, ruining the most intense relationship he’s ever had. He confides all of his frustrations to his close-to-retirement teacher and swimming partner, Logs, who runs a no-holds-barred lunchtime discussion group called Period 8. Here the constellation of high school characters in the small northwestern town hold forth on issues such as honesty in relationships and the inability of teens to make good decisions due to immature brain development. One of the guys, however, is a real snake, but Paulie and the others don’t realize the depths of his sociopathic behavior until it’s too late. This has all of the elements readers have come to expect in a Crutcher novel: empathetic teens trying to survive under the thumbs of damaged and damaging adults; a would-be savior and sage, haunted by his own past but doing his darnedest to help the kids; and dialogue that expresses preter-naturally self-aware psychological insight in gritty, hipster slang. These elements make Crutcher a taste call even when his construction is solid, but the plotting and character development falter here. Abrupt shifts in focalization deliver insight into most of the main characters’ motivations, but the villain is left flatly cartoonish, the victims are all but voiceless, and the structure of the crime is ambiguous even when readers understand it has something to do with underage prostitution. That said, there is lots of material for follow-up here in the characters’ discussions about responsibility and the suggestion that too much pressure and control at home makes teens vulnerable to abuse elsewhere. Given the foregrounding of relationship issues and the action-packed, suspenseful climax, readers will come for the plot and stay for the psychological insight.