Still earns an A

Way back in the mid-1960s, Bel Kaufman's unorthodox novel Up the Down Staircase (1964) was the hottest book in America. Does it hold up more than 60 years later? Well, yes it does, I discovered.

Kaufman, herself a New York City school teacher, imagines Sylvia Barrett as an idealistic young English teacher in her first semester at Calvin Coolidge High School in New York. What's unorthodox is the author's telling of her story without any narrative whatsoever. The novel is simply a collection of memos, announcements, notes, blackboard scribblings, student excuses, etc.

The frustrations Sylvia endures comes as much from the school's administrators as from her students. She writes in a letter to a friend, "We have keys but no locks (except in the lavatories), blackboards but no chalk, students but no seats, teachers but no time to teach."

Humor stays plentiful, as when one of her students leaves her a note saying, "You are my most memorial teacher, you teach a subject as fast as it can enter and stay put in my brain." Yet there is as much bitter as sweet, as when a girl attempts suicide and a surly boy corners her in a dark room after school.

Sylvia is pretty — nothing wrong with that, certainly — but Kaufman reminds us of this over and over again until it gets annoying. But perhaps this just helps reveal the immaturity of her students, both boys and girls, who can't resist mentioning it.

Really good books stay good with the passage of time, and I think Up the Down Staircase passes this test.