Running

Joseph Jones is librarian emeritus at the University of British Columbia
Library. He is the author of Reference Sources for Canadian Literary
Studies.

This first novel in a coming-of-age quartet tells the late-1950s
high-school story of John Dupre. John has a scholarship to an all-male
military academy because he is what then would have been called a
“brain.” Lyle Ledzinski, a Polish kid on an athletic scholarship,
becomes John’s best friend and drags him along into running. Their
initial point of connection is wide intellectual enthusiasms and
boundless adolescent conversation. Going out and getting drunk becomes a
sustaining complementary activity.

John’s other friend is rich kid William Revington. Through Revington,
John meets his first girlfriend, Linda, who is two years younger.
Linda’s executive father remains distant, while her mother actively
deplores the relationship. John and Linda date regularly for the next
two years, but keep it less than “going steady.”

John struggles with his attraction to Linda, who eventually confesses
that she feels nothing much for anybody. Again through Revington, John
meets the unconventional Markapolous family and is immediately smitten
with 14-year-old Cassandra. The summer between high school and college
makes all relationships seem temporary. Change looms.

The motor of the story is social distance, with John situated between
ethnic Lyle and Yale-bound Revington, and between typical Linda and
tomboy Cassandra. Background details evoke the broader life of a West
Virginia steel town on the Ohio River. Making the heart of the fiction
beat is the adolescent ache for the unknown, manifested in physical
exertion, getting drunk, discussing the mysteries of life, and
adventures in romance.

In a three-page afterword, Maillard discusses the complicated history
of his new series. Its title, Difficulty at the Beginning, derives from
a hexagram of the I Ching. That Chinese classic was a signature text of
the 1960s, the era into which John Dupre is heading.