Crazy

A Novel

by Benjamin Lebert

Knopf, 175 pp., $18.95

There are reasons why most 16-year-old writers aren’t published, and Crazy is one of them. The inauspicious debut of narrator/author Benjamin Lebert is a dramatically inert coming-of-age tale crammed into a few months’ time that is neither insightful nor shocking, as the title would imply. In fact, Crazy is so devoid of subtext or suggestion that it seems more like a diary of daily events, none of which are especially interesting, without the personal touch one would expect from a diary. Blurring the line between fact and fiction (Lebert uses his own name in the book), Crazy tells the story of Lebert’s stay at a remedial German boarding school and his exploits with a group of outcasts. The cast of forgettable characters includes a fat boy named Felix, a skinny boy named Felix, an effeminate boy named Florian, a depressed boy named Troy, and so on. Lebert, to his credit, hits a few high notes in gracefully dealing with his partial paralysis, but the rest of the novel — ruminations on youth, girls, heroes, and sex — doesn’t exactly paint Lebert as a precocious teenager (example: “A man doesn’t panic at the sight of a pair of tits.”). Lebert does hit a real zinger at one point, however. He writes, “Nobody’ll remember us. We’re just kids in a boarding school.”

This article appears in June 23 • 2000.

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