FICTION
Alan Lelchuk
ADVENTURES OF A FICTION BOY
Let's start down there, underground, in the basement. Where else
should a true Brooklyn boy, you know, a boy from the 1950s, hungry, raw,
maybe primitive too, begin his
full
education? In the basement. But uptown, in
a Manhattan basement, and surrounded by books. Immersed in books the
way a farmboy is dipped in nature, each with his chores as well as passion.
In my case, thousands of books set on rickety shelves and in wavering piles,
and thousands more awaiting sorting out in unopened cartons. And all of
them, secondhand and fiction. Hordes of fiction titles, awaiting sorting, clean–
ing, classifying, shelving. Detective fiction. Science fiction. Fiction for juveniles.
(Children's books, along with gothic romances, go upstairs, while Westerns
pass on to the Americana room.) But mainly, adult fiction. Everything from
D'Annunzio to Dostoevsky, Maurice Hewlett to Hardy, Fast to Feucht–
wanger, Conan Doyle to Zane Grey. And thousands of others that neither
you nor I had ever heard of. A junkyard for battered, obscure novels. A
poorman's graveyard or reservoir oflost souls, discovered delights. Under–
ground, in a used book store.
And yours truly, Aaron Schlossberg, was the guardian, the gatekeeper,
the official fiction boy. At sixteen, he was given the awesome responsibility
ofbringing order and clarity to the spilling incoherence, of keeping up-to-date
on all the ancient fiction down there, some forty thousand titles musty with
time and disuse. A vast army of writers to alphabetize, classify, sort out, dis–
cover, and remember; above all, remember where I've placed them. Oth–
erwise they're doomed to oblivion. That was my challenge.
"Yeah, don't worry, it sounds like a lot at first," advised portly George
with the unpronounceable Polish name, "You'll get the hang of it, and after a
while you'll remember the titles easily enough. They just sort of stay with
you." Now in his early fifties, George had come to Schulte's as a boy offif–
teen, to help out his sister in bookkeeping, and he had stayed on forty years.
Apink-faced bachelor who reddened at any offbeat remark about the oppo-
Editor's Note: "Adventures ofa Fiction Boy" is adapted from the novel,
Brooklyn Boy,
to
be
published in November 1989 by McGraw Hill Book Co. Copyright
©
1989 by Alan Lelchuk.
