Remember The Graduate? Sequel comes 34 years later

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/08/2007 (6639 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

By Charles Webb

Random House, 230 pages, $35

Reviewed by Jill Wilson

CALIFORNIA-BORN novelist Charles Webb has evidently been planning to publish a sequel to his 1963 debut novel, The Graduate, for some time.

Webb, who now lives in near-poverty in East Sussex, England, based the characters of Benjamin Braddock and Elaine Robinson — made iconic in the 1967 movie The Graduate by Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross — on himself and his wife Fred.

Despite that, the French film company Canal + effectively owns the characters, owing to Webb having sold the movie rights to his first novel and any sequels for a lump sum of $20,000.

The author held off publication of this snappy, fast-paced but ultimately lightweight followup until he could win back the movie rights in under French intellectual property laws.

Home School is set 11 years after the events of The Graduate. It finds the Braddocks happily married in Westchester County, N.Y., now with two young sons whom they are home schooling. (This too is based on Webb’s life: he and Fred home schooled their two children in California at a time when it was illegal; they fled the state and hid out from authorities in a nudist camp.)

As he made clear in The Graduate, Webb has a great deal of disdain for institutionalized education. He makes the principal of the local school a preening, libidinous ass, while the Braddock children are two of the most articulate, preternaturally mature and well-adjusted kids in bookdom.

However, Webb’s not so single-minded that he can’t poke fun at the extremists on the other side of the fence. The Braddocks get advice and support Garth and Goya Lewis, two staunch home-schooling advocates from Vermont, and Elaine is rightly a bit leery of these off-the-grid folks — Goya breastfeeds her nine-year-old son; her daughter Nefertiti thinks toasted wheat germ is a wonderful snack.

Unfortunately, when officials at the local school order the Braddocks to re-enrol their children immediately, Benjamin must also enlist the aid of Elaine’s mother, from whom they are largely estranged.

Mrs. Robinson, known as Nan to her grandchildren, hasn’t lost a bit of her coo-coo-ka-choo. She swoops in from California and helps out as only she can — with a healthy dose of feminine wiles.

And then she won’t leave. Both emotionally and outwardly manipulative, she esconces herself in the Braddocks’ basement and announces her plans to help with the boys’ education — by having them watch General Hospital with her so they’ll learn how to be doctors.

Webb takes a warts-and-all snapshot of the post-’60s world. Benjamin and Elaine’s struggle to maintain their values and raise their kids outside the system, and yet still live a relatively straight suburban lifestyle, is portrayed with wit and affection.

The mother-daughter conflict is also captured beautifully. Mrs. Robinson is almost a caricature of controlling martrydom, but her push and pull with Elaine will be familiar to any woman whose mother has told her she’d be so pretty if she just ran a brush through her hair.

Despite Webb’s keen eye for family dynamics, however, this is a book that’s remarkably bereft of desciptive detail; there’s no visual sense of how seductive Mrs. Robinson might still be, how the Braddock children differ from each other or how hippie-ish Goya Lewis truly is.

But Webb’s forté is dialogue, and the wryly funny exchanges between Ben and Elaine display a couple still deeply in love with each other, yet showing the over-familiarity and sniping inherent in a decade-long marriage.

It’s not the triumphant thesis one might have hoped for, but Home School earns a solid B grade.

Jill Wilson is a Free Press copy editor.