This is a decidedly tender novel that I wasn’t exactly expecting to be as good as it is. For one thing, I just read some Louis Auchincloss nonfiction, and while his thinking is very strong in those essays, the writing itself felt too pedestrian or pragmatic. But here, the language is very strong, lively, and breathed with spirit. Perhaps it’s the change in form or just the 25 years in between.
The novel is also unexpected in its form. We meet a young teacher on the first week of his career. He’s joined the staff of a private Christian school, the Martyr of Justin school, a stand-in for Groton, which Auchincloss worked for many years prior. And since I’ve read a lot of novels in which an author is looking back at his earlier days as a teacher, I thought I knew where we were headed. But this is NOT Goodbye Mr Chips, and it’s also not as weird as The Magus. In fact, maybe I should retract my sense that there’s a typical teacher book.
Anyway, the novel takes this young teacher who’s been hired with no experience and maybe no real ambition. But when he arrives, and starts feeling immediately lost, he’s eventually taken under the wing of the rector, the headmaster and head minister, Dr Presscott. The book then is less about his experience of a young teacher and more about trying to learn everything he can about this man and what comprises him and his character.
The novel is primarily told through journals and diaries, but then takes on long sections of other texts that help to answer the question of who this man is — an unpublished memoir of a childhood friend, an interview with his daughter, the journals of another young teacher of a previous generation.