Life imitates art: Spud returns

Spud: The Reunion ★★★★
John van de Ruit 
Pan Macmillan

“I think that’s an important part of reunions: not just going back to relive it. I was never going to write that story where it was the Crazy Eight going back to hang and look back at the old days and be nostalgic. I wanted it to almost feel like the first book of a new series.”

Yes: playwright, actor and novelist John van de Ruit’s John “Spud” Milton and the outrageous octet have returned. And, if like Garth Garlic, the garrulous Malawian and former classmate of the eponymous character, you suffer from  metathesiophobia — the fear of change — the fifth title in Van de Ruit’s series might #trigger you faster than you can say “one-third-life crisis”.

It’s 2003. A decade has passed since Spud bade his alma mater elite all-boys boarding school Michaelhouse (which Van de Ruit attended)  farewell. And his life trajectory is looking grimmer than his high school maths results... The aspiring 28-year-old thespian is single, living at home, relying on a gig as a supermarket clown for shekels (an experience shared by Van de Ruit), and suffering from a near-chronic bout of ennui or — à la Van de Ruit — a “one-third-life crisis”. 

Art imitates life in Spud's affliction, with the author sharing that he, at 26, underwent a crisis of this nature: “It was driven by lack of work and then the doubts creep in and your parents are saying, ’Well, why don’t you go and do something else?’ It infects everything else in your life, whether its your relationships, your social life, the way you view yourself, your dignity, your everything.”

Spud’s Sturm und Drang is magnified with the arrival of a letter inviting him to his 10-year-reunion; the prospect of spending a weekend with a group of men he’s lost touch with post-matriculation filling him with more apprehension than hiking Inhlazane barefoot. Yet Van de Ruit was adamant Spud should RSVP “yea”.

”Spud needed to test himself in this very difficult environment of this reunion. To a reunion he didn’t want to go to, with difficult men, challenging men. And by the end of it, he’s found something. And I think that was the greatest thrill in the writing. That it came to that, not just ending up with happy families.”

To paraphrase Anna Karenina’s opening sentence: “All bosom school-mates are alike; each member of the Crazy Eight is discordant in their own way.”

For a recurring motif in the novel is friendship and Spud’s realisation that the group of eight boys he’d shared a house with since his first year at Michaelhouse (their sobriquet earned owing to the marakas they caused) weren’t genuine friends. “That’s it,” Van de Ruit nods. “People go, ‘Oh, it’s Spud and his friends, the Crazy Eight’. But if you go back to those books, there’s very little caring between them. It’s banter. It’s niggle. It’s edge. It’s ripping each other off. It’s that masculine bashing-up against each other,” comparing the boys' dissonant dynamics to the characters in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

As a 13-year-old, Spud was “slightly in awe of them and desperate to fit in. He wanted approval, especially of the influential members”, says Van de Ruit.

Fast-forward 10 years and reunion-era Spud is a far more proactive and assertive Spud than the one we last encountered in 2012’s Exit, Pursued by a Bear... remarking that [w]ithout understanding all the mechanics of my inner-workings, I feel like a different man to the one who drove in on Friday with such trepidation. This new Spud can step in when needed, and lead if he wants to.

“He’s grown up faster than the others,” Van de Ruit compares his protagonist to his classmates, adding that he was "the only one not born with a silver spoon in his mouth”. He had “obstacles to overcome and that’s why he’s grown up less entitled than the wealthier characters”.

So, where are the dramatis personae introduced to readers in 2005’s Spud now? 

Robert “Rambo”' Black — their bullish self-appointed leader who abolished democracy in their second year — has undergone a 180° metamorphosis on the personality front; his dictatorial, manipulative nature replaced with one of passivity and non-resistance. “This is the interesting one because I think readers are going to be split: some are thinking he has grown up and has become a chilled, less dominating, less domineering figure, but someone like Spud is still seeing that ‘could this just be another way of him manipulating us?’ That’s the wonderful thing of having your leader of your group as an arch manipulator, almost an antagonist. It creates a very interesting thing for me to work with because usually you’d have the group and then the antagonist outside the group.”

Whereas it’s Rambo’s disposition that (possibly) changed, it’s Sidney “Fatty”' Smitherson-Scott who underwent a physical transfiguration; so slimmed-down that Spud initially doesn’t recognise him. “Not just in weight, I mean that’s alarming enough as it is for everyone, but also personality-wise,” Van de Ruit says of the changed 28-year-old Fatty. “He’s coming back a little tetchy, he has a bit of a chip on his shoulder. He now looks back at the weight and everything that happened in the school days and realises it wasn’t healthy.”

The anomalous Vern Blackadder, monikered “Rain Man” (after Dustin Hoffman's neurodivergent character in the 1988 Barry Levinson fil)], arriving at their reunion in his school uniform is “typical Vern, isn’t it?” grins Van de Ruit. “You’re not sure whether he’s being satirical or taking the piss — because he has that element to him — or whether he genuinely thinks he’s coming back to school. And as the weekend goes on, and even towards the end, you still think ‘Vern thinks he’s coming back to school’.”

Describing Vern as “one of those slightly oddball characters” who often become tech giants, Van de Ruit opines that Vern is “too far along the Rain Man scale to come back as a suave character, driving in a bakkie twin-cab”. (He rocks up to the reunion in a clapped-out Land Rover sans working hand brake, by the way).

Whereas uncertainty reigns regarding Vern’s return to school, former head boy, cricket star and token heartthrob Simon Brown — who wasn’t bequeathed with a nickname — never quite left school as he was appointed the school’s cricket director six years after they matriculated. “These are things that happen with these schools like Michaelhouse. The golden boys are expected to smash the world; they’re going to be either a huge corporate or a huge this or a famous that, but often it doesn’t happen.

“They often make safer choices because, as a golden boy at school, I think you’re used to success and you’re not used to failure. And you ultimately don’t challenge yourself as much. You take the safer option because that’s what you always did before and it stood you in good stead. So it was that interesting thing where I think everybody expects Simon to come back as quite a high-profile guy.”

As for Garth “Garlic” Garlic? A married dad of two — with the dad bod to boot— this trust-fund Malawian has remained as faithful to the body of water he exalted on a daily basis at school as he has to the itinerary he prepared for the reunion. (The latter which wasn’t adhered to. At all.)

Van de Ruit emphasises the importance of “not having everybody change completely” with the “lion-hearted wild man” Charlie “Mad Dog” Hooper — expelled in their second year — returning as untamed as ever. 

“Ultimately, Mad Dog saves the reunion. His behaviour goes off the rails, he doesn’t involve himself in the banter and chirps, and the reader knows he has the potential to go anywhere,” says Van de Ruit of the affluent Limpopo-born plaaskind with a penchant for derailing trains and dopping locally-brewed beer. “He just gets pissed, he loses his car, he has a hell of a reunion, nearly killing Boggo,” laughs Van de Ruit. 

Ah, yes: Alan “Boggo” Greenstein — his nickname owing to the vast amount of time he spent in the school’s bathrooms satiating his appetite for onanism — is now a lawyer back in Joburg, his hometown. “He’s a high-powered oke, and I think he wants everybody to see that,” says Van de Ruit, comparing this trait to Boggo’s “school-boy need to have his ego stroked”. 

The aging of the characters aside, aging Spud’s voice was “one of the most important things in writing each book”, says Van de Ruit, drawing on Spud’s reflection of the true extent of the cruelty the boys were subjected to in the early ’90s, be it taunting and bullying from teachers or fellow school boys:

It’s a reality for school like this. In these institutions, the line between victim and perpetrator can become as blurred as the line between harmless fun and malicious intent.

Describing 1990s Michaelhouse as a product of its time, Van de Ruit characterises the environ as “racist, sexist, homophobic, and unashamedly so. It was a sick society. And I think it's almost the dying days of an empire, a wilting empire”. He adds that “so much has changed” since he matriculated, highlighting the importance the school attaches to the mental well-being of the boys. 

A coping mechanism the author employed for getting through school was that of humour, he says. “I could laugh at myself if I was the butt of the joke, or I could deflect with humour. And that also makes you marginally more popular than a guy next to you.”

No Spud title would be complete without delving into the protagonist’s love life, with Van de Ruit detailing the development of Spud’s first crush, dubbed “Mermaid”, as “a surreal experience which shows his immaturity in many ways. The way he falls in love with her is very infantile,” he says of the character now married, living in Randburg, and expecting her third child.

As for the older, intelligent, sexually autonomous Amanda? “I love her. She’s a strong female character, it’s so nice that people aren’t going ‘she’s a slut’ because she wants it like that, and that's how she's going to get it. I love the way that it’s got to this bizarre relationship where they’re sexting each other in the bath,” adds Van de Ruit of the adult Spud and Amanda’s relationship dynamic. “I don’t think she’s madly in love with him, but I think she does love him and doesn’t want another woman to have him.”

And apropos the fictional tuber vegetable’s future?  “Perhaps we find out more about him in the next book,” smiles Van de Ruit.

Encore!