Pay Attention, Carter Jones

Pay Attention, Carter Jones:  A Novel

Gary D. Schmidt

Hard Cover:  Clarion Books, 2019

In Gary D. Schmidt’s newest novel, Pay Attention, Carter Jones, the story begins in a fierce rain storm on Carter’s first day of sixth grade. Another storm, an emotional one, rages inside the house where Carter and his three siblings are getting ready for school. We haven’t yet discovered that this is the storm of grief and how deeply Carter is affected by it. He hides behind a thin veneer of cheeky, smart aleck-y sarcasm which he directs toward his mom and three younger sisters. Where is the dad in this family? Why is there no milk in the house on the first day of school? Why has the mother been crying her eyes out the night before?

Schmidt beguiles us from the start with the arrival of a proper English butler carrying a huge umbrella. Carter leaves him standing on the doorstep while he acts as liaison between this stranger and his harried mother. The butler is courteous and helpful and properly English, and if you’re like me, you’ll be swept up in the nostalgia for Mary Poppins immediately. The banter between Carter and the butler continues the beguilement. The butler drives an eggplant colored Bentley and takes the children to school. Carter at once becomes the envy of his classmates.

We think that everything is going to be all right. But it’s not. Bit by bit the butler’s presence in their lives reveals what has happened to this family, and the little revelations take us Hansel and Gretel like to the deepest kind of loss. Bit by bit the butler and Carter come to a slow friendship. Every day the Butler dispenses the same advice when dropping off the kids at school.

“Make good decisions and remember who you are.”

So much of Carter’s buried pain is because he can’t forget even though he tries so hard to forget. How that advice must sting him. 

And then there’s the game of cricket like a character in its own right. Instructions on how to play this very English game grace the start of every chapter. Carter and his school friends learn to play it with the help of the very patient butler. At the end of the novel, we see it both as metaphor for the family’s very complicated history, each of the family members working hard to master the game of grief just as the cricket players work hard to learn their positions and win the match.

While the novel takes place in Marysville, New York, Carter often revisits another place in his head: the Blue Mountains of Australia during a lashing tropical thunderstorm. He is camping with his father. He is raging at his father for his father’s absence and other cruelties. And then there’s an incident that Carter believes is the reason that his father isn’t ever coming home, and Carter has never forgiven himself for it. Such a great weight for a twelve year old to carry. But for the kindness of the English butler, Carter might carry it forever.

Middle school boys will relate to Carter and the messiness of family life, middle school life, and the fraught relationships they often have with their parents. In turns, they’ll cheer on and envy and feel badly for Carter. Who knows but their curiosity may even be piqued by the arcane rules of cricket, and stranger things have happened, may even be tempted to learn the game. But there will be some boys who should read this, just so they too can be nudged down that rocky and difficult path to self forgiveness.

In the end, Carter and his family are able to pivot away from grief and toward a chance for happiness. Carter is finally be able to tell us just who he is because the truth no longer stings. That is a beautiful thing to see.