As for being too long, “the business of a novel”, said Robert Louis Stevenson, “is to be long; to supply and sustain pleasure in a workaday world.” If too long means too hefty -“Wicked,” is 839 pages - that is easily remedied. Get a music stand, place the book on it, adjust it to eye level and save yourself both back and neck discomfort.

There is something else to be said concerning the book’s length. At first glance it can be daunting but a second tells another story. The pages look welcoming, spread out for you in short chapters some no more than six pages, broken up with short paragraphs, leaving it with lots of white paper to soothe the eye.

Besides, the novel, as befitting a school setting, is laden with quotations from sources such as, Aristotle, Horace, Matthew Arnold, Donne, Marvel and of course, Shakespeare. They too take up space so that the book is not really the intimidating 839 pages but may be only 600. And the pages seem to turn at will.

There is a 19th century pioneer feeling about it as in those triple decker novels of the time, with their sense of life as an adventure, as heroes follow their bent into the unknown, with the optimism of doing a thing for the first time. It is particularly true of adolescents in “Wicked!” for whom everything seems the first time as villains consistently do their worst.

The novel is enjoyable, absorbing and I got to know the leading characters intimately. In short, I liked it.

That’s all very well. But is it art?

* * *

Looking into this matter, I consulted Henry James’ famous essay “The Art of Fiction”(1884 pub. Longmanns to see how Cooper’s novel may reflect his standards. Persevering through the delicate haze of his qualified phrases, I found him jocular, sly, emphatically passionate, highly personal, and indisputably right. The only classification of a novel, states James is “interesting or uninteresting.” He looks back with nostalgia to the generation before his, of Dickens and Thackeray, when there was, “a comfortable good humored feeling abroad, that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that was the end of it.” Unable to relinquish this metaphor, I envision Henry enjoying a pudding while he is enjoying a novel. Further in this vein, I found Cooper’s “Wicked!” like a Christmas pudding with brandy sauce and favors, which will last for months, leading me to conclude that the only classification of a pudding is interesting or uninteresting.

Getting down to the art of the matter, James lays down another law, “The only reason for the existence of a novel, is that “it competes with life”. In this respect he takes Anthony Trollope to task for confessing in one of his novels as the narrator to the reader, that the events in the novel are only make believe, didn’t really happen and that he can give his narrative any turn he thinks the reader might like best. It is a betrayal of a sacred office, James fulminates, a terrible crime. One which Cooper does not commit.

Competing with life is a very big subject for Cooper. And in her novels she creates parallel worlds to our factual one to which she adds her wild imagination and her uncensored thoughts.

An example of this is when there actually was in 1999 in the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s Sensation Exhibition, a painting of the Holy Madonna flecked with elephant feces, which had Mayor Giuliani trying to close down the show. In Cooper’s novel “Pandora”, her parallel Commotion Exhibition in New York, has an entry titled Expectant Madonna, a voluptuous, nude fiberglass figure of a well-loved diva. It’s large belly opened like a cuckoo clock with a large baby Jesus popping in and out waving to the crowd. In the uproar Cardinals and Congressmen send angry faxes to the New York Times. Attendance swells in both exhibits exponentially.

Competing with life, according to James also means something further, our emotionality familiarity of experience the reader shares with the novelist, our self-identification with fictional characters, that touches us with a truth, a fellow feeling. Competing with life is also seeing life as a competition and Cooper gives us many of these in ”Wicked!” Competing in school sports, competing in making balloons, competing in roles for the school play, competing for love, and a struggle which Cooper makes us aware of: the universal, lifetime, competing for attention.

* * *

According to James, in a novel “The story is all.” “Wicked!” has a strong, basic plot on which are hung many stories. It is a tale of two schools: the privileged Bagley Hall and the unprivileged Larkmister Comprehensive. They share the same town. The setting is Larkshire County, at once a tourist haven with a glorious 12th century cathedral, a Queen Anne courthouse, an ancient castle and a picturesque river, with beautiful houses and gardens on one side while on the other, in stark contrast, is a concrete hell, hidden from tourists by a high wall. The plot mainly concerns the integrating of pupils from both schools, a clash of the upper class with under mass when they join each other using Bagley’s superior facilities. The unsettling of the forced bonding causes rips at every venture.

Bagley a well-endowed boarding school (in America called a prep school) where pupils with all their entitlements lark about and in the other side of town, Larkminster Comprehensive, Larks as it is known, (in America, a public school), is candidly called “a sink”. Its pupils disaffected, with no entitlements whatsoever. It is in total disrepair with broken windows outside and broken school furniture inside, caused by classroom brawls, with leaking roofs and muddy playgrounds. Its high rate of truancy is matched with its truant teachers taking time out for stress. It is on the verge of closing. A property tycoon is set to transform it into luxury residences, which includes the town’s black spot, the notorious Shakespeare Estate, where the families of the children survive.

Named after Shakespeare, the streets and roundabouts named after his best known plays, it is one of the dark ironies that haunt this novel: its name mocking the hopes and ideals that must have gone into its planning, a constant reminder of how badly it has all turned out. It stands a ramshackle breeding ground of crime – muggings, drugs, carjackings, burglaries and, for one reason or another, many of its inhabitants in and out of the county jail. The children living there seem generally to be training to join the criminal class.

* * *

Applying the maestro’s conditions that a contemporary novel should make use of contemporary words and phrases the first thing that strike me about “Wicked!” is Cooper’s mastery of the living lingo-how it is used and why - especially by school children as a way of separating them from adults.

The very title “Wicked!” is an example with its exclamatory interjection of approval, which seems to be usurping the popular “cool.” It’s more mischievous, outrageous, with a sexual undercurrent so hot as to make “cool” sound lukewarm.

In current kidspeak sexual intercourse is “shagging,” “bonking” and “pulling”. Social intercourse is “schmoozing.” Marijuana joint is a “spliff”. A drug addict suffering from heroin withdrawal is “off her face.” People no longer arrive at a destination, they “roll up.” The dismissive retort to a question they don’t feel like answering, “Yeah, yeah whatever.” People over 40 can be labeled “wrinklies”. “It’s so not good” is now the only way to say, “It’s bad.” As for adult lingo, we learn to beware of certain overworked words of social worker lingo: challenging, counseling and caring. These people are up to no good. Conversely, she is partial to upper crusty male authority figures to whom Cooper gives the best lines. In the office of Bagley’s headmaster a subordinate who is driving him crazy is told to, “Get out and ruin someone else’s evening.”

Lingo is given legitimacy by enlivening the authorial voice, freely dropping into lingo throughout the novel. Dear Henry himself has a go at his contemporary cool lingo, with his own cutting edge phrase “’to get away with it’” to which he adds by way of enlightening his readers “’as they say in California’”. And even in the last sentence of his essay we find him urging young novelists “to be generous and delicate and then in the vulgar phrase, ‘go in!’”

Jilly’s signature style is peppered with puns and word play. One I liked in “Wicked!” was of the trio of rich, beautiful and seductive Bagley girls called “the Three Disgraces”. Jilly can sing both high and low. She can spread out or confine herself to a memorable sentence as when a young girl is so badly bullied she tries to hang herself with her tights during school break.

* * *

The main heroine in “Wicked!” is a piquant young redhead named Jana Curtis who is the new headmistress of the sink school. She is determined to work a miracle to turn the school around and prevent it closing. Dedicated but working on a short fuse, vulnerable but tenacious, volatile, and vehemently left-wing. I found her reminiscent, of the plucky, zany but always competent screwball heroines of the great comedies of the ‘30s and 40s. She also gets on your nerves at times – especially for shagging one married headmaster at her former school followed by another married man, both affairs going nowhere. But though over emotional and blundering, she is pragmatic and problem solving. Preparing for a parents meeting at the school, finding there is not enough children’s art to brighten up classrooms, she herself draws some children’s pictures to add to the rest.

She has a dog named Partner, so she can say, ”I live with a partner.” Having invited some pupils over to her place for high tea, she offers them junk food kids really love, opening a huge bag of crisps with her teeth. When she has to leave a note she tears off pages in her diary from Yom Kippur to Halloween. Wears striking attire, favoring pinks and reds and drenches herself with Diorissimo when out for the evening. She is also too fond of drink.

“Wicked!” gives us five gifted teenagers in Larks who hang together, with aptitudes all of which, if properly developed, will lead to successful careers. One girl is a highly talented hair-dresser and makeover artist, the other has a beautiful singing voice. The three boys are all of great promise – one in acting, one in painting and the third in sports. All five have problematic homes. Graffi, whose graffiti is all over buildings gets channeled into painting murals. Feral, the aspiring footballer has a mother on heroin who lives with a drug dealer, who beats them both up. Paris, the accomplished actor of personal magnetism and quick intelligence must contend with perilous circumstances at his orphanage. He also got on my nerves for getting good foster parents and then doing his best to try their patience with his uncontrolled, attention getting rages.

We are also given gifted and ungifted teachers who range from inspiring to incompetent and cruel.

* * *

“A novel which undertakes to reproduce life must be perfectly free”, says Henry. “It lives upon exercise and the very meaning of exercise is freedom” Jilly is OK with that.

In many newspapers today, TV, films and book reviews end with the caution: “Strong language, explicit sex and some violence.” As both Cooper and her readers know, these are daily occurrences among teenagers now. It’s as well what Jilly likes to write about, the step-by-step-to-climax sex act, and what her readers like to read. As for violence, the destruction of private property (always a winner) is amply portrayed.

Underage sex for my taste does make for uncomfortable reading. I was tsk-tsking my way through one of Cooper’s many sexual encounters of the adolescent kind. Then I reread an article I had written in the 60s called “First Love” about myself when very young. The first paragraphs read like this:

“All children are born promiscuous, their bodies active volcanoes erupting unexpectedly time after time, the lava running down between their legs and melting their insides hot with desire as certain stimuli cross their paths.

”Was my first love Dickie Brekker? Was it John Kubie? Tom Barber? It is impossible to pin down this emotional noun to its singular form. It is loves, not love. I can’t even remember who followed whom in my fancy, though their features are accurately and ineradicably filed in a special cabinet of my mind to be rolled out for an occasional pang.”

So all that was going on, but that was then and this is now.

In “Wicked!” the girl’s dorm at night in Bagley is filled with the buzz of vibrators. At first I was startled until I remembered masturbation is one of the rites of passage into puberty.

In my high school days, my friends and I were into heavy petting, but that was the limit. Now of course intercourse has peer acceptance (actually peer insistence). I wondered where the couples went. A librarian in Mississippi complained to me of teenagers making out in the stacks of the library.

* * *

“Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of liking a novel or not liking it,” announces Henry, midway through his essay. “The more improved criticism will not abolish...that primitive, that ultimate, test.” What an immense thing he has just told us, how simple, how true and what a novel idea. What a happy accident that I should have written that I like “Wicked!” in the first page of this piece before I read these words Now they lead me to the discovery, without apology of certain novels by accomplished writers that I could admire but not like. Some of George Elliot’s novels for instance. While admiring her storytelling and building of characters, I disliked her endless philosophizing slowing up the action and the priggish smugness I detected in the author herself. Similarly I hated the dunghill that is “Gulliver’s Travels” revealing the unpleasant Swift snarling his way through it.

On the other hand, I like Jilly’s work and I like Henry’s. And I mean, all of it. I got to know them so well. As can be seen, they have become Henry and Jilly to me. They are both transparently in love with creating novels.

Henry reminds us of the glory fiction is capable of that no other art form is: not painting, not poetry, not music, not drama. This is the singularity of getting simultaneous points of view. We imbibe the author’s point of view at the same time as we do the characters’, and the effect one character unexpectedly has on another, all mixed in with changing landscapes and weather. While Jilly gives us present of nine pages of acknowledgements, raking over England for all the people she can find who will give her information she needed to create the parallel world of schoolchildren today. Walking a mile in her shoes, for the average person would be to invite hospitalization for exhaustion.

In their own lives I find an inborn gregariousness that quite contradicts our vision of novelist as hermit clinging to his solitude. The high-octane content of their native sociability caused Henry, an inveterate diner out, to confess to accepting 140 invitations in the winter of 78-79. And Jilly to comment of herself simply, “I always was a nosey parker and loved seeing what everyone else got up to.“

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