The Education of Crazy Jane
Steven B. Sandler
self-published, 2024

I

n the same way that an immortal American archetype is that of the cowboy of the old west, the modern archetypal equivalent is that of the hippie. A hippie might even be a stronger American stereotype as it is gender-neutral. Both men and women were full participants of the flower power movement of the late 1960s, tuning in, turning on and dropping out, and the idea of the hippie, especially in conflict with traditional power sources, has powered countless American stories. The Education of Crazy Jane, self-published by Steven B. Sandler, is another one of them, although the noisy title is misleading. This tale of protest and disillusionment among college students in Michigan, a light and fast-paced read, is less about what one woman learns and more about what one young man wants her to know. 

It’s 1968 and Jane Adagio is active in the SDS and studying to be a painter while her older brother Anthony has enlisted in the army for a tour in Vietnam. Anthony has three inseparable childhood friends—Matt, a stoner musician, Trotsky, a political firebrand with beard and glasses, and Sam, a mild-mannered history student—who live together in a shared house while they study and, more importantly to them, figure out their own opinions about the political moment. Jane knows her own mind and is more interested in bringing the lads around to her point of view. The lads are more moderate, to an extent. They do a large amount of their own cooking, and while they are doing their best not to be sexist their actions (and their willingness to label Jane ‘crazy’ among many other things) make it clear that they are not interested in having any woman do their thinking for them. 

At first Sam has a stridently feminist girlfriend named Suzanne he doesn’t much like. He meets Jane for the first time in years when she puts herself in harm’s way at a protest to retrieve an heirloom watch he’d dropped. This impresses Sam, but not for the right reasons; although he’d never say it, he prefers a woman who puts him first. The way Mr Sandler repeatedly contrasts Suzanne’s tone-policing-as-activism with Jane’s easygoing but serious willingness to break the law for the greater good makes this extremely clear. And yet when Jane and Sam become a serious couple, an awful lot of energy is devoted to Sam’s feelings about Jane’s protest work. You can tell a man wrote this because his ability to imagine a young woman’s life is entirely limited to her interactions with men. Jane paints, makes macrame plantholders, designs anti-war t‑shirts, and has bottomless energy to join campus gatherings, but while the boys have each other she only has Sam. Other than the time she spends with her brother, her boyfriend and his housemates, none of Jane’s other relationships are shown. No female friends coming round, no cups of coffee with an aunt.

But if the book is that classic masculine fantasy of a strong woman being brought to heel for her own good, it is both gentler and less offensive than that description makes it sound. Jane’s heedless willingness to throw herself into the fray for a cause has serious academic and legal consequences, and Sam’s concern for her is equally for his comfort and her safety.

All the while they walked and talked, Sam was listening, considering, evaluating her positions on things. He didn’t see her as ridiculous, of course. Naive, yes, but never ridiculous. If anything, he had put her on a pedestal. He was, we must remember, in love—a state of mind that often disregards the most obvious signs of excess, deficit or imperfection of any kind. Still, it was a stretch for him to embrace her Quixotic notions about the evolution of humanity. Well, he reasoned, if Jane was Quixotic in her ideals, then so was [leader of the Prague Spring] Mr Dubček. Besides, he definitely admired her for being bold enough to maintain such a glorious view, realistic or not.

Sam’s ride-or-die childhood friendship with Anthony is also part of it. Jane sees her political actions as essential to helping her brother come home, though Anthony takes them as insults and expresses these feelings in regular letters to Sam, who feels caught between the rock of his personal ethos and the hard place of wanting to be a good boyfriend and friend. There must be a middle way between Anthony’s war service and Jane’s penchant for mayhem, but Sam can’t quite find it. And when Anthony does come back from his tour, things become more complicated still.

There are some quirky narrative digressions than a more traditionally edited book would have lost, which would have been a shame. These diversions (which, very unusually, are not overdone) actually add to the bigger picture, which for all Sam and Jane’s news interest and debate about the Prague Spring, they simply don’t stop to see. They are young and in love, convinced of their own righteousness, and further convinced others will come around to their way of thinking. It’s this evocation of the certainty of youth which is Mr Sandler’s most significant achievement, and the reason The Education of Crazy Jane deserves an audience. Things have changed a great deal since 1968, but not everything, and it’s useful to read stories like this to understand where the needle has moved, and why.