Margaux with an X - Ron Koertge

This was my second book by Ron Koertge – the first being Shakespeare Bats Cleanup. When I began reading, I was not at all sure I was going to like the book. It just had a sort of negative feeling for me, and I was not totally pulled into it. Perhaps I had too high expectations, having liked Shakespeare Bats Cleanup so very much. But, I liked it enough to keep reading, and in the end decided it was a very good read. Not sure I would have persisted if it had been my first Koertge book; but, as things stand now, I am in the market for another book by him, for sometime in the near future.

The story is about Margaux, beautiful, and, we get the feeling – mean. In addition to being mean, she’s also restless and unhappy, and ultimately, the book is about her effort to get past this restlessness and unhappiness, to move beyond it and find something more meaningful and positive in her life. And, in the course of this journey, we also discover that the meanness we sense in the beginning is more of a façade than a reality. Or, we discover that there is much more beneath the surface.

Margaux’s a high school student, in LA, with a set of wacko parents, who she seems to not like at all (and, with good reason, we decide, as we read and learn more about them). She has a close girl friend, and together, the two of them seem like a powerful, mean duo, alternately feared and admired by others in the high school community. What is not so quickly understood about Margaux, but revealed as the book progresses, is that she is smart, and she loves words. I think this is where the book got several degrees more interesting to me (though by this time I was also definitely engaged by the story line). She thinks about and plays with words, and uses sophisticated, obscure, and interesting words.

Example here:

An hour later, Margaux listens to Sara and a couple of her dunderheaded acolytes describe some farcical gymnastics in the inevitable back seat. p. 110

When I realized this, I then was suddenly able to make the connection between this book and the other one by Koertge. It’s not just Margaux who cares about words, it’s also Koertge. Now, yes, sure, all authors care about words. But, for some more than others, this is a driving concern, a central feature of their writing. While at first I thought these two books – Margaux, told in regular prose, and Shakespeare, written as a series of poems – were stylistically really different, I in the end have come to believe that they are actually very similar, even though their “shape” differs. Words really matter in each, both in the writing – from the author’s end, and for each of the main characters, Margaux and Kevin. [Margaux with an X, while written in third person point of view, is most definitely told through the eyes of Margaux, so it’s her voice and her word choice we are experiencing.]

Last but not least, the book has some suspense/mystery, and some fun relationships between interesting characters (I hesitate to say romance, because I’m not sure that it’s quite the right word, but, it’s something like romance…).