‘Poor Gertie’ Falls Victim to a Wobbly, Inconsistent Plot

Poor Gertie by Larry Bograd, illustrations by Dirk Zimmer (Delacorte Press: $12.95)

Poor Gertie! She’s a 10-year-old suffering the angst of the ‘80s: Dad has left Mom for another woman; Mom doesn’t earn enough money to cover the rent, and Gertie, alone too much, is either ignored by the kids at school or tormented by the class bully and the class princess.

On the upside, Gertie has a talent for drawing that she uses to escape into her problem-free “Gertsworld,” a friend named Pearl who is a “tough cookie,” a lovable old Grampus who fixes things, and a secret collection of used chewing gum--petrified wads stashed in a shoe box.

Much is made in the first chapters of Dad’s new girlfriend (“young and not too bright”), but the situation is never resolved. Friend Pearl talks about one of her mother’s boyfriends who attempted to molest her, but that idea is dropped after a couple of paragraphs. Grampus, who rescues broken items from a K mart dumpster, becomes a mouthpiece for political commentary (“ ‘Back then (during the Depression), the White House was willing to help people. Today it says ‘Peace’ and builds weapons.’ ”)

In one chapter, they’re broke because Mom had to buy new tires for the car, and a couple of chapters later they ride a bus to a warehouse to buy groceries in bulk; one wonders, of course, why they don’t drive. In one scene, Gertie, uncharacteristically mischievous, stops up the bathtub with tampons because Mom hasn’t been paying enough attention to her, but we don’t learn Mom’s reaction.

The class bully snatches Gertie’s only pair of shoes; Grampus finds her a ridiculously unmatched pair. But then what? Who knows?

Gertie faces two major challenges: finding enough money to keep the Dickensian landlord from evicting them, and climbing the rope to the ceiling of the school gym. But she has a third and even tougher challenge: making it through Bograd’s inconsistent plot that wobbles along a narrow path of realism and finally careens over the edge.

Ultimately the heroine does meet two challenges, triumphing in ways that stretch credibility until it snaps (she sells her gum collection to an art dealer for $100). She barely survives the third: the plot.

The fundamental problem here is that the characters are believable, the situations are believable, but the characters’ actions in those situations are not. The book reads as though Bograd had a couple of good characters and a few ideas in mind and dashed off the story before he had thought it all through. Then, too, writing in the first person has its limitations, and Gertie’s flat voice is not one you want to listen to for long.

Poor Gertie! She’s a likable kid, and her situation is one many other kids may identify with. The themes of poverty and loneliness deserve better treatment than a thin book priced at $12.95.