Book Review: Debbie Jones

Title: Debbie Jones

Author: Laura Cooper Rendina

Publisher: Little Brown

Date: 1950

ISBN: none

Length: 244 pages

Illustraition: full-color frontispiece by Ruth King

Quote: “Without much hope she glanced over toward her new roommate…What a fiendish beginning for a new year!”

Though it’s a freestanding novel in its own right Debbie Jones is apparently the sequel to a story called Roommates about the previous school year, in which Debbie got into some sort of trouble with her roommate that caused them to be separated, turned the dorm manager against them, and got Debbie assigned to a different dorm for this year. In Debbie Jones we see Debbie anticipating trouble with “Peach Fuzz” for no other reason.

But this is the story of Debbie confronting some of her own personal problems. Basically Debbie is an extrovert. Though bright and talented, she scatters her energies, fails to carry through on commitments, disappoints everybody, tries being nice to her roommate but just doesn’t seem to understand her, and risks being expelled at the end of the term.

Still, everything is going to be all right, we know, even as we wait with Debbie to find out whether she’ll have to spend the rest of the year at a different school. How do we know everything is going to be all right? Because this is 1950. Whatever else young people, especially girls, do or don’t accomplish the important thing is to get them paired off and breeding “happy little dollar signs” to feed the economy. Debbie is the still-favored type, a tall blonde. She’s pairing off with a tall blond boy from her home town. They will produce beautiful blond dollar signs. If they don’t like feeding their days, and their little dollar signs, into the Waste Age economy, it’ll be easy for them to get tranquillizers. In 1950 nobody anticipates that those tranquillizers will produce the stereotypical harmless-psychotic homeless people found in shelters across North America. Anyway lots of tall blond middle-class Americans liked bringing up little dollar signs in the 1950s.

I can’t say I liked this specimen of the 1950s “girls’ novel,” though I found it well written and credible. Rendina had observed her students. The roommate who seems like “a fiendish beginning” isn’t bad, just not the one who’s become Debbie’s friend and not the type to hem the curtains Debbie can’t be bothered to hem; she’s just throwing herself into her studies because she’s had bad early experiences with the dating game. Were these experiences only the repeated bores and disappointments she describes to Debbie, as Heaven knows most teenagers’ dates still are, or has Mary been date-raped? Debbie will never know; nor will readers. The roommate, whose name is Mary, nicknames herself Shelley to sound more literary, though she’s not as serious a writer as Debbie—who’s not a serious writer.

Debbie is told she has a talent for writing, but she doesn’t. People who have a talent for writing write. Debbie spends her time hanging out and chattering with her favorite teacher instead of writing the essay her favorite teacher wants her to submit to the essay contest to represent the school, or listening to smarmy 1950s songs of Teen Romance on another dorm mate’s record player and thinking about her favorite teacher from last year. That would be Mr. Bingham, who’s moved up to a teaching job at the university. Debbie has a bad crush on him for most of the term, though she has enough sense not to talk about it. At first she plans to hate the new teacher, Marsha Merrill, just for taking “Bingie’s” place, but soon “Marsha” seems like her and Shelley’s other best buddy and Debbie neglects her old friends for the long serious talks about politics into which Marsha draws them.

Lacking memories of the political climate of 1950, I have to take Rendina’s word for it that this sort of thing went on at schools like Pine Ridge Prep: Everyone is blandly, trendily “liberal” in the 1950 sense, rehearsing the politically correct things to say about laborers’ right to strike. Marsha is just a bit more radically left-wing than the other teachers or the students. Some of the other teachers don’t like her for that reason. Debbie and Shelley convince themselves that an indignant parent can get Marsha fired for persuading a student to want to make a career of being a union organizer. The headmistress resents that, because she just knows Marsha will outgrow being so radical in a few years, and because she makes her own decisions.

I deeply disliked the fundamental assumption of this whole genre of novels—that what every girl needed was a boyfriend, soon to become a husband and the father of at least three little dollar signs, even if the girl had had some success on a job—when I was a teenager. I still do. That good writers worked within the rules of this genre, as with any other, didn’t salvage a genre that rested on a lie. Now that most people recognize that few Teen Romances lead to marriage and probably most of the ones that do shouldn’t, and although it’s splendid to find a Partner For Life a woman can’t afford to plan to depend on her husband’s money forever any more than a man can plan to depend on his wife’s money, and girls need to think more about work and less about sex, I suppose the 1950s girls’ novels have some historical interest. This one is more wholesome and better written than many of them were. I think it’s even possible that the character of Shelley is a sort of protest against the obligatory built-in falsehood of the genre, a warning that was tolerated in 1950 because so few people let themselves notice it.

The character of Debbie Jones is another warning that probably can’t be heeded. Much more than Shelley needs Debbie’s guidance to join more activities and have more dates, Debbie needs Shelley’s guidance to settle down and study—but Debbie’s not wired to do that anyway. If she’d been a real person she would have been promising to eat less, exercise more, quit smoking and drinking, and stop picking fights with her third husband, a few days before the fatal heart attack, probably in the 1970s. We see her feeling guilty and promising to improve. We don’t see her actually improving, because the Debbies of this world never do.