Thoughts on Sleepaway School:


Publisher Comments:
There are family-like bonds that can form within the larger human family, when one's own family life has been broken into fragments. Such is the case throughout Sleepaway School , Lee Stringer's recounting of his years at Hawthorne Cedar Knolls — a school for kids at risk — and the events that led up to them.

The clash of being poor and black in an affluent, largely white New York suburb begins to foment pain and rage which erupts, more often than not, when he is at school. One violent episode results in his expulsion from the sixth grade and his subsequent three-year stint at Hawthorne, the "sleepaway school" of the title. What follows is an intensely personal American journey: a universal story of childhood where childhood universals are missing. Excluded at first by his peers, Stringer develops an outsider's eye, enabling him to see some things more deeply from without than from within. Such insight, however, is not enough to assuage the anguish he feels over his isolation. And when this spills out Stringer finds himself in yet another, darker institution.

In Sleepaway School , we experience how a child fashions his life out of the materials given to him, however threadbare. This is a boy-meets-world story, the chronicle of one child's struggle simply to be.

Review:
"In his second memoir, Stringer ( Grand Central Winter ) retraces a troubled 1960s New York City childhood, one full of hope and promise that deteriorated into years of emotional pain. Born out of wedlock, Stringer and his brother lived with their financially struggling mother until bills overcame her, compelling her to turn them over to foster care. Stringer describes how, as a youngster, he fought other kids, kicked over desks and bad-mouthed instructors, never questioning his school counselors when they said he was full of anger. He questioned the difference between his black world and that of the white, 'normal' one, where hate and intolerance seemed usual. Stringer was committed for two years to a school for at-risk children, where his Stringer's reputation for having a wicked temper followed him. Springer's lean prose renders his mother as a resourceful, determined woman who buys her rageful son a punching bag to vent his anger. Only through poetry and art did Springer find outlets for self-expression and a fresh start for the reminder of his youth (until his adult crash with drug addiction). Springer deftly tells a believable, candid and vivid tale of a person scarred by his past. (June 3) Forecast: Springer will tour America by train, making more than 25 stops in cities and towns. Fans of 1998's critically acclaimed Grand Central Winter will want this new book, and the tour could draw in new readers, too. "Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Synopsis:
Sleepaway School tells the story of how Lee Stringer reclaimed the mystery and promise of childhood out of the grip of adversity. After crises of family and identity come to a head put up for adoption at birth, sent away to a school for troubled children at age eleven Lee Stringer describes the turbulence of his first sixteen years, recollected here with startling balance, grace, and humor.

Sleepaway School:
Stories from a Boy’s Life
By Lee Stringer
Seven Stories Press, 2004

Review by Timothy Harris

Grand Central Winter, Lee Stringer’s 1998 book about life as a homeless crack addict and being editor of New York’s Street News, was a raw, funny, and flawed effort that left you wondering if this new author could ever do it again. The writing ranged from powerful to pretty average and the final chapters had the distinct feel of padding old columns from Street News revised and set hastily to type. While Stringer’s first book remains one of the better first person memoirs of homelessness, I never much expected a second act.

Stringer’s new book, another memoir, this one about growing up poor, black, and troubled in Mamaroneck, a suburban town in the backwaters of New York, proves me wrong. This collection of more than thirty vignettes forms a classic coming of age novel that has the unmistakable polish of a writer compelled to get it right. If Grand Central Winter, even with all of its flashes of brilliance, didn’t quite hang together, Sleepaway School’s evenly sustained and compelling storytelling establishes Stringer as a writer of consequence.

The author convincingly puts us inside the head of a boy (think Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land, but in the ‘burbs, and with maybe a touch of Holden Caulfield) who screws up without really knowing why. It begins with casual lying and escalates to the sort of random violence that gets him sent to Hawthorne Cedar Knolls, a boarding school for troubled boys that accepts the odd state client.

Stringer’s reasons for being such an angry kid don’t come neatly packaged. Instead, he just focuses on the stories. One of the first involves keeping a terrible secret, and then, when he is found out, being celebrated as a hero when he only feels like a liar. Others concern the preoccupations and minor rebellions of adolescence: fitting in, discovering sex, sneaking cigarettes.

Race plays a major role in all of this, with Stringer growing up Black in a mostly white middle-class neighborhood. When he makes new friends, his mother asks “chocolate or vanilla?” When the answer is vanilla, the reply always came back, “I’ll bet you they have money.” He wrote in Grand Central Winter that he “never did like what that implied about my own prospects.”

Some of the most interesting moments in Sleepaway School come when the Stringer sees himself, distorted, through a white lens. The neighborhood bully who demands to see his penis. The school play about the Old South performed in blackface and exaggerated accents. There is a moment when, during a friday fried chicken dinner, a boarding school classmate pegs Stringer as a welfare case who “never had it so good.”

My point of view does a complete one-eighty,” he writes. &ldquoNot my own eyes I’m looking through anymore, but theirs. Seeing myself sitting there. In my charity-issue clothes. A big, greasy, chicken-eating grin on my face. Like I never had a decent meal before in my life. … The fried chicken suddenly obscene. … And smoldering with private shame. Because Pee Wee is entirely right. I’ve never had it so good.”

Stringer finds, after a time, an environment in which he thrives. His small successes are encouraged and he wins the respect of his classmates. His explosive temper fades as he learns his own strengths and his free-floating anger at being poor, fatherless, and Black in a world made up of light-skinned “favored sons” finally subsides. When he goes home, he knows he will miss the structured support of Cedar Knolls.

While Sleepaway School has what passes for a happy ending, we know that Stringer did not live happily ever after. The complicated relationship between limited life prospects and self-loathing is more enduring than that. Hopefully, Stringer’s gift for self-revelation will produce a third book to help us finally understand.

Rocky Mountain News review:

Hope awakens in poignant 'Sleepaway'

By Mary J. Elkins, Special To The News
June 11, 2004

Lee Stringer is a recovering drug addict. In 1998, he published a memoir titled Grand Central Winter: Stories from the Street, in which he told of his 12 years living as a homeless man in New York City.

He now follows this critically admired work with a second memoir. This one, Sleepaway School, goes back to his childhood and adolescence. And like his previous book, it underscores the salvation he found in becoming a writer.

Stringer (referred to in this book by his given first name, Caverly; "Lee" is a nickname) and his brother Wayne have been abandoned by their father and turned over to a foster mother while his natural mother tries to find work and earn enough to reclaim her children.

When Caverly is six, his mother returns, but the reunion is bittersweet.

Caverly and Wayne are happy with their foster mother, and their real mother takes them away from their small town to a New York City suburb where, as African-American children, they are minorities and outcasts. Trouble is inevitable.

As the children get older, school becomes more of a battlefield, and Caverly discovers in himself an anger he can neither articulate nor control. Tensions escalate, and he hits a teacher who has been kind and patient with him. This act brings him to Hawthorne Cedar Knolls School, the sleepaway school of the title, a place for "children at risk."

At first this doesn't seem so bad: The food is good, the rules manageable. But Hawthorne is a school that has only recently admitted students sent by social services as Caverly has been; most of the others are privately admitted and privately funded. Labeled as "state," Caverly is marked again as a minority and an outsider; even his new clothes, handed to him on his arrival, give him away as a welfare case.

The largest part of Sleepaway School is set at Hawthorne. Stringer tells his story in a straightforward, unsentimental way. His style is natural with few frills and ruffles. At one point, Caverly is sent for observation to a psychiatric institution more than a little reminiscent of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. When he returns to Hawthorne, he's asked if it was a scary experience; he nods in vague assent.

But he thinks to himself: "There's no way to explain to him. That being locked down on a ward full of madmen wasn't really the scary thing. Coming to realize that Grasslands Hospital psychiatric department had no miracle in store for me - that I was to be shipped back to sleepaway school at the end of my stay unchanged - was harder to take. The scariest thing of all though, was discovering the sublime satisfaction I got out of life in a bathrobe. How willingly my desire for anything more than that had surrendered to the allure of blissful nothingness."

Caverly's story is about the struggle to find words for the way he's feeling. The most surprising thing about Sleepaway School is that it is not grim. In fact, much of it is lighthearted and free from bitterness. Caverly's voice is appealing, and his innocence and helplessness are convincingly conveyed.

Hawthorne is not some grim terrible place cut out of a Dickens novel (or a contemporary newspaper). Many of the adults he meets there are good people, not sadists, and some of the boys offer a version of friendship. In a foreword to the memoir, Kurt Vonnegut praises the universality of its themes and stresses the details it contains that are common to all children growing up.

This seems well said. In spite of the setting and the occasional violent outbursts, the reader doesn't feel distanced but engaged, and this is a real strength of the book.

It is also, obviously, Stringer's intention. In his preface, he comments about the term "child at risk" and applies it to every child: "Every mother's son of us. Even those of us with overflowing larders and soft, warm beds. Our young hearts like leaves in the wind, we all had to face down the inner turmoil of being, simply, children. We were all on shaky ground."

Mary J. Elkins is a faculty member in the Honors College at Colorado State University.