High Schoolers Learn About the Meaning of Friendship

Among Friends by Caroline B. Cooney (Bantam Books: $13.95, hardcover; 169 pages)

Most contemporary young adult novels are first-person narratives that record the protagonist’s words and point of view. The style is easy for adolescents to identify with, but it is also limited. The reader cannot know more than the immature hero or heroine does.

Some novelists evade the limitation by teaming up a boy and a girl, as Paul Zindel likes to do, so that the reader has complementary perspectives on what’s happening. “Among Friends” tries an even more complex variation. Six high school juniors are given The Assignment by their English teacher: keeping a journal. The four girls and two boys each achieve an individual voice, and the multiple entries covering a most eventful three months provide a more rounded interpretation than any single character could supply.

Cooney’s technique is particularly appropriate for her very relevant subject--academic perfection and the jealous peer pressure that inevitably accompanies it. We see what it feels like to be Jennie Quint, who has been programmed by her parents to be No. 1, and who cannot help striving to realize her many talents, even when she is losing the friends she so desperately needs: “I love doing my best. It makes me feel shiny inside, and breathless.”

Awesome Threesome

But we also see what Jennie looks like to the other two-thirds of the once-inseparable Awesome Threesome, the not-so-perfect Hillary and Emily, who keep wishing for “Jennie to be ordinary again.” Yet Jennie’s scholastic triumphs mount higher, and she acquires the sarcastic nickname “Star of the East” for her brilliant Christmas pageant. As jealousy spreads through the school, the girls’ friendship dissolves, and Em and Hill discover the cruelty of which they are capable.

Three other characters, Ansley, Jared and Paul, comment on Jennie’s super-stardom and consequent isolation. The very rich and very superior preppie twosome, Ansley and Jared, conduct their own well-managed lives and discreet affair, but they also develop an unexpected humanity as they aid the book’s other focal character, the mysterious Paul. How Jennie will manage to realize her sparkling capacities and yet connect with others is one of the book’s mysteries. Paul Classified, as the school names him for his secrecy, is the other.

Attractive and aloof, Paul reveals nothing. Naturally, all the girls are crazy about him, including Jennie. He takes refuge from poverty and family problems in a desperate self-control that makes the whole school as determined to find out about him as they are to chastise Jennie. In the overprivileged world of this book, where almost everyone lives in “Yuppie Yard,” Jennie’s workaholic drive makes her a misfit. Paul is isolated not by his inner goals but by outer circumstances: his stepmother, deserted by her husband and other child, is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Miseries Alleviated

Paul’s miseries are alleviated by his learning to accept help and friendship, but Jennie can re-achieve the camaraderie she longs for only after her triumphs have been shattered by a dramatic disappearance and much group worry. She is loved again because she couldn’t ace the test for state Star Student, and a wise parent tells us that “endless perfection and achievement can be as horrible for a person as endless failure and pain.”

Bless resilient Jennie, however; her last entry shows her both ready to say she’s sorry and busily planning her next musical, even though she knows she may be isolated again. The author doesn’t reward her with Paul, either.

It is a pleasure to find a book for young readers that not only individualizes characters through their writing but also has wise words to say about how writing offers very real help in coping with the problems of growing up.