Don't Play Dead Before You Have To, by Maia Wojciechowska
Don’t Play Dead Before You Have To, by Maia Wojciechowska. (Hardcover)
I’m back on the 70s books, and HOO BOY, this was something.
Basically, Don’t Play Dead Before You Have To could have be titled: HOLDEN CAULFIELD, BABYSITTER.
It opens with this:
O.K., kid, I’m here to baby-sit for you and I don’t want any trouble out of you. We’re going to get along just fine if you stay on your side of the fence. What do I mean? Look, kid, I’m a loner. I’m not about to make friends with you or anything like that, see? I’m getting paid to sit for you and that’s it. I don’t intend to be your pal or anything.
So, that’s Byron, who’s fourteen years old when the book opens. He’s talking to Charlie—short for Charlemagne—who’s five.
The book, which clocks in at 115 pages, takes place over the course of four years—and despite Byron’s I’M A LONER DOTTIE posturing, he and Charlie eventually matter to and depend on one another very, very much.
Because of Byron’s voice, it reads super-ultra-duper 1970, but the concerns and questions and issues are evergreen:
If you don’t know what I’m talking to you about don’t worry, because I only just started thinking about it. What bothers me is the fact that we grow up but we don’t get any better, only worse. And I don’t know why that is. Maybe you have the brains to figure it out. You ever notice kids younger than you—how nice and friendly and open they are, and happy? And then you ever notice kids my age—how self-conscious they are, and how phony and miserable they look most of the time? Well, what I want to know is, why is that?
Although it’s Charlie who has the more dramatic arc—he winds up in the hospital after attempting suicide when he’s eight—it’s really Byron that we see grow up.
A lot of it is reallyyyyyy rough to read fifty years later—considering that everything Byron says comes through a filter of machismo and bluster, you won’t be surprised to hear that the way Byron talks about women is largely grody. But I suspect that some readers in the present day will also have huge issues with the way that he talks to Charlie, period.
Weirdly enough, it worked for me? But I tend to like stuff from this era and I tend to like prickly and I tend to like teenagers who Put On A Show. It felt extremely clear to me that A) behind Byron’s nonsense is a genuinely curious and questioning mind, and B) the two of them are a unit from almost the first moment, even though, let’s face it, Byron is a bit of an ass.
Other dated/side eye from 2021 stuff: SO MANY POLISH JOKES (Wojciechowska was Polish-American); one use of the n-word.
Random:
The Kirkus review is somewhat hilarious, as they’re riffing on the narrative style of the book.
The University of Southern Mississippi has a collection of Wojciechowska’s papers.
NYT: Obituary.