Beth Bosworth came of age in Teaneck, New Jersey, as it became the first American school district with an all-white board to vote for bus-enforced integration; she had material and chops aplenty to write a memoir without breaking a sweat. But though the plot of her first novel, Tunneling, uses the headline-grabbing events of that time and place as a frame, the narrative revolves around the self-protective fantasy world of a brainy, humorless 12-year-old named Rachel Finch.
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Burning with literary ambition and aloof to the philistines around her, Rachel spends her days awaiting the nocturnal visits of S-Man, a superhero who takes her on time-traveling missions to save writers–Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Chinua Achebe–from an archvillain named Laff Riot. When another girl equipped with the same first name, writerly dreams, and gawky self-importance moves to town the two forge a hilariously precocious literary friendship. But when the first Rachel suspects the newcomer, Rachel Fish, of having a superior soul, she hoards the secret of S-Man, a betrayal with tragic consequences.
Tunneling’s flights of fantasy are weighed down by psychological symbolism, and as they come to obscure Rachel’s reality the story gets heavy and violent. But the girls’ comic awfulness and Boswell’s gift for rendering visual gags in prose (at one point a hamster shoots out of a chemical explosion, followed by a snickering green minivillain) make the book as charming as it is disturbing. To glibly ignore tragedy may make one a Laff Riot, says Bosworth, but “without laughter we can get so trapped in canned thought. Humor for me is a way out of self-consciousness, and with it we can write about ideas without giving ourselves airs, I hope, but it is also a way out of making readers feel sad.”
