The title of Allegra Goodman’s novel, and its cover, point to the nature of its content: it is about a girl called Sam. The first sentence of the novel is almost unnecessary.
There is a girl, and her name is Sam.
Sam is white, and American, and sad. The second sentence suggests a reason.
She has a mother named Courtney and a dad who is sort of around, sort of not.
When the novel starts, Sam is seven, and has a two-year-old brother Noah who doesn’t share the same father. Which initially seems like a good thing, given the unreliability of Sam’s father, but it becomes obvious that Noah’s father has his own problems. Courtney works two jobs to make ends meet, and is fiercely devoted to her two children.
Sam is a climber, literally. She scales anything in sight, from the doorframe to the tower at the county fair. Her father takes her to the YMCA for climbing lessons, and she is hooked. Rockclimbing, then becomes a thread that runs through the novel.
Climbing is hard. It’s not just a sport; it’s an art. It requires your whole body and your whole mind. Humility. Perseverance. Respect! You respect the wall; you learn from the wall, and you know that nine times out of ten you fail. That’s the main thing. You will fail. You will fall. Climbing is mostly falling.
For those who are not taken by the sport themselves, this theme may get a little dull. Through the book, as Sam gets older, she attempts various climbing feats, fails, fails again, and finally succeeds! Goodman makes a solid attempt to get the reader to understand the lure of the sport, but it will fall a little flat with some readers, I suspect.
But only a little. There is a lot more to this book that climbing; it is a coming-of-age novel about a girl whose life is no bed of roses. Her own father has substance abuse issues and vanishes for months or years at a time. Noah’s father Jack is more present, but can be aggressive and mean. They live on the edge of penury, in a house owned by Jack’s parents, to which they have no right of ownership or contract. She is a misfit at school, with no real friends, but content enough to stay under the radar.
Goodman does a lovely job of slowly exposing this background through Sam’s eyes. That said, this is not a book for those who are expecting plot twists or dramatic events: nothing much happens. No alarming or unusual characters appear in Sam’s life that change her life.
The writing is simple, as befits a 7-year-old’s thoughts.
She slows down a tiny bit. It’s not [Noah’s] fault for being born. His hair is black, but his eyes are green. When Sam tells his something, he believes her.
When Sam is in her late teens, she has matured:
Her life is simple now. Work, sleep, study, eat. She is not happy but that’s ok. She is not confident, but she is calm. It’s like competing when you have your head together. Every second, you know what you should do.
The unsung hero of this novel is Courtney. What a woman! Working two jobs, tired all the time, living on the edge with two children (one of whom, Noah, turns out to perhaps be on the autism spectrum), and yet, always with the mental and physical energy to push the children into a better life. Noah has trouble with homework, so every day, Courtney or Sam sit with him to work him through it. Sam could easily fall through the cracks, but Courtney is determined that Sam will have a better life.
She takes Sam to Planned Parenthood to get a prescription for the pill. This is because Sam was a surprise, and Courtney never finished her degree. She started at Dean College, but she dropped out when she had Sam in sophomore year.
“But then you were glad you had me,” Sam reminds her.
“I was glad, but I should have waited.”
Sam points out, “Then it wouldn’t have been me.”
Her mom says, “Can you listen to what I’m saying? You go to college and you get a job and then you can decide everything.”
The other reader favourite character is likely to be Ann, the grandmother of Sam’s boyfriend Justin when she is eighteen. She is elderly, tiny and frail, but sees everything and is completely nonjudgemental. When Justin and Sam shower together:
Ann says, “You save a lot of water, don’t you?”
It is sometimes the case that a reader’s thoughts about a book say more about the reader than the author. At nineteen, Sam is faced with two choices: finish the tedious boring accountancy program at the local community college that would lead to a job, or take student loans and study the Earth Science that she finds so fascinating at the University of Massachusetts. “Do both! Finish the accountancy so you can always get a job, and support yourself through the Earth Science degree as a part-time accountant!” I thought , a typical risk-averse immigrant. But this is an American book, implicitly supporting the American ideals of following one’s passion.
Sam is a kind, gentle, book with more under the surface than one might expect, but it lacks the fascinating intrigue of Goodman’s Intuition.
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