Same difference?

~ The Grammarians, by Cathleen Schine ~

This clever, original, entertaining novel follows a pair of very unusual people.

Many of us, growing up, were fascinated by twins. Imagine another person with the same appearance and shared entirety of experience as oneself! Twins in books always seemed to have such a blast, like Fred and George Weasley. They could read each others’ minds, have secret languages, and pretend to be each other. What fun! (In real life, of course, twins can be fraternal and no more alike than any sibling. They still have the shared experiences, though)

In The Grammarians, identical twins are born into the Wolfe family.

Laurel and Daphne. Two names for the same minor Greek goddess. But Uncle Don, who disliked them, sometimes called them Romulus and Remus Wolfe.

The two red-headed girls have always had a deep internal communication, they often have the same thoughts, and they develop a secret language. So far, the quintessential twin story. Yet even at the beginning there are hints of differences.

Laurel was older by seventeen minutes. Daphne hated those seventeen minutes. “I’ll never catch up.”
Laurel did everything first. Everything good, everything bad.

This precocious pair are deeply fascinated by language and words. As children, all it takes is an interesting word to capture their attention.

Inevitably […] one of the girls would tire and trip, banging her head on the coffee table, and the crying would begin.
“Stop this fracas!” their mother would say in a voice of mock severity. They had only to hear the word ‘fracas’ and they would cheer up and begin again.

Their parents, Arthur and Sally Wolfe, are also interesting and original, with a wry sense of humour. Both adore the girls, but are honestly perplexed by them at times, and Sally feels excluded by their closeness to each other. I found myself thinking Arthur and Sally would be enjoyable company of an evening: a testament to the author’s delineation of the characters.

In the evenings the sisters waited for their father, kneeling on the couch, side by side, staring out the living room window.
“Maybe a wolf did suckle them when I wasn’t looking”, their mother said. “They have a canine sixth sense. They know when you’re coming.”
He suggested they bring him his slippers in their mouths, one per.

Their father, Arthur, brings home a dictionary, which captivates these language-loving girls.

Sally sometimes encouraged them to watch television just to get them away from the dictionary. It couldn’t be healthy, two little faces pecking at the musty pages of a dead man’s discarded book.
“How can ‘mean’ mean mean and also mean mean?” Laurel said.

The novel follows the girls all the way through adulthood, and each period is equally fascinating and entertaining. After college, they end up in New York, where they live together in a garret. Laurel teaches kindergarten and Daphne is a receptionist at a newspaper, but there are now small gaps in their closeness.

This was not the first time Laurel had held things back from her sister. She could sometimes feel herself clutching at the details of her life, keeping them for herself as long as possible. [..] She had never minded sharing toys or clothes or candy with her sister. But she didn’t want to share everything that befell her — or might befall her. She didn’t want it all to disappear into her sister’s existence. Was that selfish? The one person she might have asked was Daphne.

Inevitably, love and marriage separate the two, and their differences sharpen. One falls in love, one wonders if she will ever find a boyfriend. One gets her nose fixed, so that the two are no longer identical, and the additional implication that their shared original nose was imperfect deeply hurts the other. One is considerably more ambitious. They are attracted to different men. It is fascinating to watch the author delicately expose these changes in each character.

At first glance the writing might seem plain and straightforward, but it is perceptive and thoughtful. The playfulness of language is most apparent in the quickwitted dialogue. And as befits the characters, there is much discussion about words.

“I know what an adverb is and where it goes, for god’s sake. I, for example, am picking up a knife. I have only one sister at which I am pointing it.”

The flaws are minor: an opening section where the twins talk to each other as babies seems unrealistic and over-imagined, and some of the expositions about word use and origin were a bit much for me (but might still appeal to a reader with a deep interest in linguistics).