Review of Vintage by Steve Berman

Our 17 year-old hero lives with his favorite aunt in a small New Jersey town.  He narrates first-person, and I don't think the poor devil ever gets a name in the book – at least not a first name.  We are told his Czech surname in an offhand exchange on page 86:  Vesely. So that's what I'm going to call him.

Vesely's best friend is a beautiful "goth" girl Trace who loves all things romantically morbid:  ghosts, the films of Tim Burton, and reading the obits for funerals to attend at random.

Our story opens at the graveyard, during one of these random funerals. It's autumn and the crisp air blows dried leaves underfoot.  Vesely wears a suit borrowed from the vintage clothing store where he works.  He and Trace don't know anyone in the funeral ceremony, but that's not the point. They just want to dress up and linger far in the background, posing languorously amongst the old tombstones and absorbing the experience.  It's a lovely, atmospheric scene.

Trace rambles on, bringing up old-fashioned maladies whose names she enjoys: consumption, ague, dropsy. She reminds Vesely of the lace parasol that he brought to a funeral in August. When it's time to go, the two get into her piece-of-junk car that threatens to stall at stoplights, forcing her to speed through all intersections without slowing for the yellow lights. I had to laugh.  I had a car exactly like that once, and that's how I had to drive it!

They get to her house where she whispers a greeting to the presumed ghost of her missing older brother, Mike.  Her bedroom is everything it should be to reflect her personality:  a beaten copper hand from "some witchcraft store" hangs on the door. She has a dog-eared paperback copy of a fantasy novel written by the author's real-life friend! She and Vesely smoke chocolate cigarettes that apparently come wrapped in leaves.  Not to obsess over the details or anything, but this is wonderful stuff. These teens feel so authentic.

On to the plot.  We've already learned early on that Vesely is gay when Trace calls him an endearment and he thinks (page 12):  "No guy had ever mouthed such sweetness to me except in dreams." 

When he walks home that night from Trace's house, he meets a boy named Josh on the deserted highway. Josh wears a perfect vintage outfit of 1950s clothes, and speaks in short, cryptic phrases.  Even so, Vesely can tell that the attraction between them is mutual. He's baffled when Josh disappears.

It turns out that Josh is the local ghost who died under mysterious circumstances while walking home from a party in 1957. Here, it looks as if Vintage will follow an extremely worn-out theme in young adult literature:  sensitive teen gets obsessed with unobtainable ghost and must be persuaded to embrace adulthood instead.

But Vintage has more going for it than that.  Vesely is attracted to Josh but perceptive enough to wonder whether Josh is really good for him. Plus, he falls into a relationship with another boy in town.

Also, Josh is not the only ghost Vesely can see. His traumatic past has sparked his latent psychic abilities. As ghosts everywhere realize that Vesely can see them, they grow insistent on communicating with him.  He now has to grapple with his emerging powers even while pursuing his first love affair.  

Young adult readers will really enjoy this.  Adult readers like me get an added bonus: a fascinating glimpse into the tribal rites of today's goth/emo teenagers.

The novel is at its best when Vesely and his friends interact. On page 101, they imbibe Jim Joneses:  a made-up drink consisting of "… different flavors of Kool-Aid with premium blend vodka or pure grain alcohol from Daddy's liquor cabinet … and for one lucky glass/drinker, add a finely ground, random selection from Mommy's medicine cabinet.  A few weeks ago, I had been the hapless winner and spent the whole evening out on their deck, my legs dangling over the side, mind paralyzed."

I'm thinking, how appalling! But totally believable.  I've also got to laugh at the name, which is the perfect ironic label these kids would enjoy even though Jim Jones's Kool-Aid disaster happened before they were born.

The two almost-sex scenes are particularly good. Sex scenes are always difficult to do in young adult fiction.  A few novels are too graphic, but most either stop at the bedroom door or gloss over the details – and that feels false to me because who is going to pay attention to those details more than a teenager losing his virginity? Vintage implies what's happening by focusing on the characters' intense emotions rather than the physical aspect. The result is realistic and even hot, but never inappropriate.

Another remarkable scene has Vesely dancing in lesbian bar in Philadelphia.  He and a girl are tongue-kissing each other as they pass a glow tube back and forth from mouth to mouth. Here at Obsidianbookshelf.com, I thought to myself, wow.  That never would have happened between gay kids (of different sexes) from the seventies or eighties. From this scene, I realize that today's teens have an innocent flexibility that allows them to enjoy ambiguously sexual situations like this without either recoiling self-consciously or analyzing everything to death afterwards. 

I ended up reading Vintage (a great title) right through the night.  It's an atmospheric, fast-paced, emotionally involving novel. I recommend it to teens and adults both.
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• Buy on Amazon.com:   Vintage: A Ghost Story
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