'Home School' picks up where 'The Graduate' left off
BOOKS
Novelist Charles Webb once again catches Mrs. Robinson in the act.
EASTBOURNE, ENGLAND — "OK, here it is: 'The Graduate, Part 2'! Ben and Elaine are married still, living in a big, old, spooky house in Northern California somewhere. Mrs. Robinson, her aging mother, lives with them. She's had a stroke. And they've got a daughter in college -- Julia Roberts maybe. It'll be dark and weird and funny -- with a stroke." So said Buck Henry, the co-screenwriter of "The Graduate," to an indifferent studio executive in Robert Altman's "The Player."
The 1967 film "The Graduate" cemented the careers of screenwriter Henry, director Mike Nichols and star Dustin Hoffman. The one person who didn't fare so well was the author of the source material, Charles Webb. "The Graduate," based largely on his life, was Webb's first novel, published in 1963 when he was just 24. He received $20,000 for both the film rights and the future film rights to the characters.
On Tuesday, , St. Martins will release Webb's sequel to "The Graduate," "Home School." It is Webb's eighth novel but his first to revisit the best-known of his characters. The story unfolds in Hastings, N.Y., in the 1970s, and Mrs. Robinson does indeed come to live with Ben and Elaine as they battle the Westchester school board. It's a light, funny and satisfying book. As the book's editor, Paul Sidey, puts it, "The sequel is not quite the same in terms of being iconic, but it has all the wit and style of the original."
Yet the story behind the creation of "Home School" is as unlikely as any fiction. In April 2006, Jack Malvern, a reporter for the London Times, tracked Webb down to Hove, in Sussex, England. He discovered that Webb, at 66, was about to be evicted from his apartment and that he had written a sequel to "The Graduate" but was reluctant to publish it because the film rights to the characters were owned by Canal Plus. Sidey, an editor at Hutchinson Books in London, immediately reached out to Webb, and within a month a deal was in place. "I read about his plight, and I tracked him down," Sidey said, adding, "It is very easy for people of quality to slip through the cracks, especially in publishing." The book is dedicated to Malvern.
The reports on Webb's life read like a cautionary tale of early success -- he has moved almost constantly during his adult life, he has held a series of menial jobs to support himself, he's been homeless to the point that the check for his advance for "Home School" was mailed to him at a Salvation Army shelter, and he is still in debt while caring for his lifelong partner, who recently suffered a nervous breakdown. Despite the easygoing charm of his novels, one expects to meet a shivering wreck.
