The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
Review by Kate
Publication Information: Speak (Penguin Group) / 1978 / 192 pages
Format: Paperback. Or rather, I should say, my fourth copy of the paperback?
Genre: YA (technically “middle grades”, meant for readers 7-12), crime, mystery, thriller.
Where I heard about it: In 3rd grade, while my gifted class read Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, the 4th graders were reading The Westing Game. I, as only a nine-year-old can, became obsessed with the book, but my teacher told me I couldn’t read it because we’d be reading it next year… and then she changed the curriculum on us. I ended up borrowing a copy from the classroom shelves and devouring it. That was 17 years ago.
Spoilers: A bit more than you’ll find on the book jacket, but less than you’ll find on Wikipedia.
Review:
A bizarre chain of events begins when sixteen unlikely people gather for the reading of Samuel W. Westing’s will. And though no one knows why the eccentric, game-loving millionaire has chosen a virtual stranger – and a possible murderer – to inherit his vast fortune, one thing’s for sure: Sam Westing may be dead… but that won’t stop him from playing one last game!
I am, as a rule, not a re-reader. There are no more than a dozen books that I’ve read multiple times, and I can name almost all of them off the top of my head: Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy, Lawrence Block’s The Burglar in the Library… The list goes on. I like my stories complete, finished, and filed away in my mind where they can safely stay the way I remember them. There’s none of the ugliness that comes from meeting an old friend ten years later and discovering he’s developed a beer belly and a receding hairline. I cherish my books that way.
But not The Westing Game. The Westing Game is a book that I read at ten. And at fifteen. And at twenty. And at twenty-two. And, and, and.
Whoever, whatever else he was, Barney Northrup was a good salesman. In one day he had rented all of Sunset Towers to the people whose names were already pretended on the mailboxes in an alcove off the lobby.
Who were these people, these specially selected tenants? They were mothers and fathers and children. A dressmaker, a secretary, an inventor, a doctor, a judge. And, oh yes, one was a bookie, one was a burglar, one was a bomber, and one was a mistake. Barney Northrup had rented one of the apartments to the wrong person.
Ellen Raskin was an illustrator until the last eight years of her life and The Westing Game was her final (and most acclaimed) book. It tells the story of sixteen strangers who are all invited to live in an all-new, exclusive apartment building… And who are all drawn into the mystery of eccentric paper-goods giant Sam Westing. When Westing dies suddenly, all sixteen residents of Sunset Towers are invited to the reading of his last will and testament and told that his fortune will go to the one who finds the answer. To what, no one quite knows. The whole story revolves mostly around Turtle Wexler, the shin-kicking, braid-wearing, mostly-forgotten resident of apartment 3D. Turtle discovers the body. Turtle, more than anyone else, wants to solve the mystery. Or maybe, Turtle just wants to be noticed.
“Hey, look! There’s smoke coming from the Westing house!” Again, Turtle was late with the news.
“Oh, it’s you.” Mrs. Wexler always seemed surprised to see her other daughter, so unlike golden-haired, angel-faced Angela.
Flora Baumbach, about to rise with the found pin, quickly sank down again to protect her sore shin in the shag carpeting. She had pulled Turtle’s braid in the lobby yesterday.
To the uninitiated, then, The Westing Game sounds like a typical pre-teen mystery. And admittedly, elements of it are. But more than that, it’s a novel about sixteen people, their lives, and the way one crazy stranger draws them all together – for better, for worse, and maybe for better again.
It’s hard to describe to someone who’s not read this book exactly how human all the different characters are. From Turtle to her pretty sister Angela, from good-guy Theo and his disabled (but also very able) brother Chris, from Doctor Denton Deere to recently-immigrated Mrs. Hoo, everyone has secret depths that slowly reveal themselves in the book’s 200-ish pages. I cannot name a single character, from the doorman to the dressmaker and back again, who doesn’t evolve in the course of the story. And I dare you to finish the book without loving every last one.
“Perhaps my fiancé can help.” Angela bit her lip. Theo was not asking for charity. And fiancé, what an old-fashioned, silly word. “I went to college for a year. I wanted to be a doctor, but, well, we don’t have as much money as my mother pretends. Dad said he could manage if that’s what I really wanted, but my mother said it was too difficult for a woman to get into medical school.” Why was she gabbing like this?
“I want to be a writer,” Theo said. That really sounded like kid stuff. “Would you go back to college if you won the inheritance?”
Angela looked down. It was a question she did not want to answer. Or could not answer.
I lose my patience with a lot of modern literature, especially YA, because of its insistence on being contemporary. So many books are so clogged with pop culture references, they essentially have a two-year shelf life. I can’t imagine my children reading the books I grew up with because they’ll have no frame of reference. The Babysitter’s Club books were written when some telephone exchanges were still represented by letters instead of numbers. The Lois Duncan and Christopher Pike thrillers I inhaled are products of the pre-laptop, pre-internet, pre-cell phone world.
Raskin – maybe on purpose, maybe just out of sheer luck – managed to create a book so timeless, it takes my breath away. I forget when reading that this story is older than I am, and that entire generations of pre-teens have grown up with Turtle. Her style (Raskin’s, not Turtle’s!) is simple and elegant, descriptive without being overwrought, and every plot point is perfectly placed. There’s no dragging in the middle or beating you to death with the climax; instead, every last detail is placed with surgical precision, but still feels totally natural.
And even though it’s not meant to be a thriller, its that ease that spurs you on and keeps you glued to the page.
“He looked too peaceful to have been murdered,” Turtle said. She sneezed and Sandy handed her a Westing tissue.
“How would you know?” Doug replied. “How many people have you seen murdered?”
“Turtle’s right,” her friend Sandy said. “If Westing expected it, he’d have seen it coming. His face would have looked scared.”
“Maybe he didn’t see it coming,” Theo argued. “The killer was very cunning, Westing said.”
When I was moving from Arizona to Kansas this past summer, the one book I made sure to take with me in the car was The Westing Game. Somewhere past Denver, where the road flattened out into bare green, I pulled the book out of my bag. My whole life was up in the air – I was moving to a new state, I was six weeks from starting law school, my cat was dying – but this book that I discovered when I was nine, it was with me. I read it straight through, barely speaking to my mother while she drove, and when I cried at the end, they were different tears than the last half-dozen times I’d cried at the same lines.
You know, Elle made a comment in her Liars and Saints review about books coming at the right time in your life, and I think there’s a truth to that. It can’t be the absolute truth, though, and The Westing Game is the reason why. I’ve destroyed three copies of the book and this evening, before writing this review, went and purchased my fourth, a pristine, unopened version to sit with pride of place until I read it again.
Instead of there being a time in my life for this book, it is more that this book is just part of my life.
Full-stop.
Overall rating: 10 decadent chocolate bon-bons:
The best-of-the-best.
(For more rating information see here.)
