One boy's gritty take on growing up

Skateboarder's story is one of resilience amid adult despair

09/01/2002
By PAULA FRIEDMAN / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

Andrew Winer gives us a wise and moving coming-of-age tale with his first novel, The Color Midnight Made.

Living in the Bay Area town of Alameda, 10-year-old Conrad Clay has a lot on his mind, including an alcoholic father, a tense, preoccupied mother and the often challenging other boys in his multiracial working-class neighborhood.

An avid skateboarder, Conrad hits the streets with his friend, Loop, to escape troubles at home. But with its naval base closing, Alameda seems a little tired, a little defeated, and neighboring towns don't provide much relief. When Conrad's mother's car breaks down, the family looks at a used car in Oakland, where "Moms" immediately complains that the neighborhood there looks as dilapidated as their own:

The Color Midnight Made
Andrew Winer (Washington Square Press, $24)

We pulled up in front of a building called Creekside Luxury Apartments and Pops turned the engine off. The three of us stared at the beat-up building. It was painted bruise yellow, and brown water stains sunk down the walls under each window ... In the dirt yard some kids had laid black Hefty trash bags in a row, with rocks in the corners to weigh them down. A small naked girl held the hose so the water shot down the line of bags while the other kids jumped and slid on their backs across the wet plastic.

But the author is not looking for pity; Conrad has enough wiry strength to bounce back, no matter what he faces. When his beloved grandmother dies, and his parents' marriage falls apart, he looks to the other neighborhood children for respite, though as the only white boy in his crowd, Conrad must combat his feelings of separateness as well as the group's assumptions about him.

One of the most refreshing things about Mr. Winer's novel comes from its treatment of race, a subject neither skirted nor milked for easy reactions. But race never really becomes the novel's focus, though like the neighborhoods Mr. Winer takes us through, it has its own particular characteristics against this faceted backdrop.

Loop's easygoing family seems at first a haven for Conrad when Moms discovers her husband's infidelity. But we are left with no easy division here, either, as the initial happy unity Conrad thinks he perceives at his friend's house turns out to be something more fuzzily complex and far less problem-free than the boy had thought.

In the end, what readers are left with is the sense that youth, even with all its traumatic difficulties, is graced by a surprising and life-saving resilience.

Free-lance reviewer Paula Friedman herself lives in the Bay Area, in Oakland, Calif.