True Notebooks

I've been suffering through a stretch of mediocre books. No one's to blame, I choose my own reading material. It's almost more disappointing to find yourself faithfully sticking with a 'just okay' title than it is trying to slog through something awful. I've learned to abandon works that are awful. But mediocrity often threatens brilliance and so you continue on, sometimes rewarded, sometimes not.

Thankfully, Mark Salzman's True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall disrupted all the so-so of late and was brilliant from the get-go. Salzman sits in on an L.A. writing class for teenage offenders and then begins his own. He starts the book with a list of reasons not to get involved. One of the most striking is that crime victims don't get free writing classes so it may be inappropriate that criminals do. His hesitation here speaks to the larger questions of offenders' rights and the role rehabilitation can play in prisons but his book doesn't draw black and white conclusions. Salzman doesn't sugarcoat the bad deeds of his students though he finds it difficult to reconcile their violent actions outside the prison with what he sees in their class work (fear, hope, depth).

True Notebooks does assuage another of Salzman's early concerns about getting involved: that his writing class will be futile because art doesn't matter enough. It does matter. A student writes, "I can create anything with my imagination, pencil, and paper, and before I know it I've created something that was in me the whole time, my pencil and paper just helped me let it out, freely."