Schooled

by Ted Fox, Lake Union, 2022, 283 pages
Reviewed by Ted Streuli, January 27, 2023

I have several rules about books.

Rule No. 1: Check the publisher. Self-publishing isn’t the swamp of death it was 20 years ago, but no one has ever said, “Thanks but no thanks, HarperCollins. You keep the advance to yourself. I’m publishing my debut novel on my own!”

Rule No. 2: If it sucks at the 40-page mark, it isn’t going to recover.

I’ll be honest. My parents were adults for The Great Depression, and I was reared in a waste-not home. Logically, I know from repeated experience that no book that’s lousy for the first 40 pages is ever going to get any better.

Emotionally?

Well, that’s a whole other story. Waste not! It doesn’t matter what it is, how little it cost or how much I dislike it, by God I’m going to finish it. A baseball game that my team is losing 17-0 in the seventh inning?

No way I’m leaving. I might miss the greatest comeback in baseball history.

Horrid movies? You’d have an easier time walking me to the electric chair than prying me out my seat before the credits roll.

Yes, dear God, I shall eat every bite of that hardtack posing as prime rib at the community dinner theater production of “Sweeney Todd,” and no, I shall not sneak out at intermission. Let’s not broach the subject of ex-girlfriends. You’ll smile smugly and slowly shake your head anyway when you think it through.

Rule No. 3: If anyone pads, bail out. No padding across the room. No padding down the hallway.

Padding is what you wrap around fragile items in shipping boxes to fill the empty space. Sometimes you add a little padding to a budget. But it should never, ever describe human locomotion. We walk. We shuffle. We tiptoe. There is no dearth of perfectly good words to describe walking quietly, including “walking quietly.” The moment a writer resorts to padding, invoke the rule and get out fast. Like Rule No. 2, it’s a sure sign that things are only going to go downhill from there. I won’t (see explanation above), but you definitely should.

“Schooled” was in my library. The warning signs were there. I ignored them. Here’s the plot: Disgraced entrepreneur Jack becomes stay-at-home dad raising two adorable children while his loving wife skyrockets up the career ladder. Conflict arises when Jack’s high school nemesis, Chad, moves to town, enrolls his child at the same elementary school, and the pair of them compete to become parent organization president. And here’s the subplot: Jack is still wrestling with giving up his career and is annoyed that his wife works so much, which she comes to resent.

They have a tiny tiff, then they kiss and make up. Conclusion: Good guy wins.

Requisite nod to contemporary mores: The best friends are a same-sex couple, one of whom was treated badly when she came out to her best friend in high school.

If that sounds like an amateurish attempt at a first novel, you have also come to understand why this was published by Lake Union, a self-publishing imprint owned by Amazon, rather than, say, Penguin Random House. If the point of “Schooled” was to illustrate that whiny, repetitive petty grievances are boring and pointless to everyone but your therapist, and interesting to him only because he’s billing your insurance $300 per hour, it would have succeeded. One can’t shake the feeling that Ted Fox had some high school issues still haunting him and he needed 80,000 words to work them out.

To be fair, a few of the jokes were nearly funny. Fox didn’t quite pull them off, but the effort was there.

The characters were flatter than the cardboard cutout of John Wayne I took a selfie with, and the plot more predictable than the outcome of a 49ers-Cowboys playoff game. (Insert insincere apology to Cowboys fans here).

“Schooled” did have one redeeming quality: No one padded.

Heed the warning signs and save yourself $4.99.