1958

He’s smart. He might be a genius, but in Resume Speed in 1958, they don’t test for things like that. Besides, he doesn’t know he’s smart, and it wouldn’t change him if he did. What he knows for sure is that if you let it, life would be pretty funny. He knows that the girlfriend he doesn’t have, the matchless Cheryl Loeb, is twice the girlfriend his best friend doesn’t have. Finally, he knows he has an enemy who is determined to destroy him, and to him there’s sport in that. His name is Lawrence, which in itself is not bad, but his full name is Lawrence Lawrence, and that should be felony. In a mutinous act, he renamed himself Gunnar, and he’s a rascal but not a scoundrel. Somewhere wedged between those two words, we find a surprising measure of both character and virtue. In the main, this is his story, but it is also the story of an aging English teacher, an underachieving underclassman, the villain, a girl, the Communists, a dead body, puberty, and what a smart kid does to stay sharp in an exceedingly dull place. Welcome to a year in the life of Gunnar Lawrence, who has both the good luck and the awful misfortune to grow up in the unremarkable little town of Resume Speed.