Two Across by Jeff Bartsch: book review

Two Across (2015) is set in the 1960s on the east coast of America. At 15 years of age in 1960, Stanley Owens and Vera Baxter tie for first place at the National Spelling Bee in Washington DC. Stanley is from DC – he lives with his mother, Martha, in Suite 512 at the Hawthorne Hotel. Martha is anthropophobic – afraid of people. Vera is from New York – she lives with her mother, Vivian, in various hotels around the country due to her mother’s job as secretary to a sales executive.

Stanley and Vera meet again two years later in DC, when Stanley’s mother is pressuring him to apply for university courses in politics in order to become a senator. He wants to be a crossword puzzle designer. Vera loves mathematics and French literature – her mother wants her to become a mathematics professor.

On August 1, 1963, they marry, not for love, but for money. It is Stanley’s idea to have a fake wedding to get ‘sizable cash gifts’ from their wedding guests. They say goodbye to each straight after the wedding, and meet a month later in Cambridge, where Vera attends university on scholarship. Stanley is there only because his mother thinks he was accepted into Harvard, but he didn’t even apply.

Stanley takes tutoring jobs and creates crosswords to submit to newspapers, especially the New York Times. He gives Vera some tips on how to create crosswords, and they even design a few together.

But Vera lives on campus and Stanley lives in a studio apartment. ‘She was with Stanley, but also not with him, not the way she wanted.’ They don’t even spend term vacation together.

Stanley writes term papers for other students for payment and the cheating scandal is discovered. In 1967 Vera is disillusioned by this sham wedding and disappears from his life. Stanley goes home to confess his lies and secrets to his mother. She has secrets of her own – about his father Nick.

At the age of 29, in 1973, Stanley can’t get Vera out of his mind and continues to look for her. By now he is living in New York, working as the crossword editor for the New York Times. Can he find her through crossword clues? He gets a tip from an unlikely source – but can it be trusted?

This is Young Adult fiction and commences in a believable way – at the National Spelling Bee competition. I think the concept is interesting, and I like the idea of Vera’s ‘magic’ pen and the crossword themes. However, Stanley’s trickery becomes difficult to believe at times, and I’m not convinced about the TV show. The 10-year-gap period is long, drawn out, and forgettable. Although the story gathers momentum again, it ends too abruptly – and rather strangely. Young readers may like this novel, but it’s a bit of a rollercoaster ride.

MARTINA NICOLLS is the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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