The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

"You girls," said Miss Brodie, "must learn to cultivate an expression of composure. It is one of the best assets of a woman, an expression of composure, come foul, come fair. Regard the Mona Lisa over yonder!"

Every once in a while I encounter a book that leads me to suspect that it may actually be about me, not in some Ode on a Grecian Urn kind of way, but as in, the author actually wrote the story of my life, both my life as a student at a girls' school before and as a teacher now. Adored as she is by her young students, my suspicion that I may in fact have a great deal in common with Miss Brodie is not a particularly encouraging thought.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is the story of the irrepressible, inimitable Jean Brodie, and the "Brodie Set" -- six students at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh whom she has hand selected as "la creme de la creme," those girls whom she expects to shine, either on their own merits or by the sheer force of her considerable will. They, in turn, devote themselves hopelessly to her and the seemingly bottomless mysteries of her inscrutable adult life.

Miss Brodie is an iconoclast at Marcia Blaine, continually in conflict with the Headmistress Mackay, who spends a large portion of the novel coaxing those of the Brodie set to reveal enough of Miss Brodie's unorthodox teachings that Miss Mackay might find an excuse to let her most troublesome faculty member go.

Miss Brodie, for her part, in the classic tradition of Fictional Humanist Teachers, scorns the standard curriculum and instead regales her students with tales of her travels, love affairs, and cultural and political observations. As Miss Brodie explains to the Set:

The word 'education' comes from the root e from ex, out, and duco, I lead. It means a leading out. To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education, I call it intrusion.

In this moment, early in the novel, I seem to hear myself on Parents' Night, watching them nod and smile at my idealism and energy.

This book is not, as you might expect, some kind of 1930's Gossip Girl, nor is it the "girl version" of Dead Poet's Society. Miss Brodie's pupils are much younger that those students, and as the story opens, are hapless in their love for Miss Brodie and in their attempts to understand the intricacies of her Adult Life.

As Miss Brodie leads her student out into the world as she sees it, at the same time, the girls occupy themselves imagining the details of Miss Brodie's love affairs with both Mr. Gordon Lowther, the singing master, and Mr. Teddy Lloyd, the one-armed art master, and "the only men on the staff." Who knows what really happens in Miss Brodie's personal life; the version her students imagine is much more real.

For example, best friends and Brodie Settees Jenny and Sandy occupy themselves one term completing "the love correspondence between Miss Brodie and the singing master." In the girls' minds, after Miss Brodie "gave herself to him" she ends her (imaginary) correspondence thus:

Allow me, in conclusion, to congratulate you warmly upon your sexual intercourse, as well as your singing.
With fondest joy,
Jean Brodie

In this way, The Prime of ... hilariously illuminates how much being a teacher is like being a politician or movie star, left vulnerable to whims of grocery store tabloids and, in reality, entirely unable to control public perception.

Miss Brodie is only object in this book; she exists only as she exists in her students' minds. Like Slughorn in Harry Potter, there is something slightly ... if not exactly sinister, something ... pathetic about Miss Brodie's attempts to cultivate her set.

Being a teacher can be heady. I am so familiar with the feeling of watching some TV or film version of a teacher and seeing myself in him or her, sometimes in good ways, other times not so much. Being a teacher can be mostly about being a performer, but with viewers who do not get to choose whether or not they tune in. I am always struggling to avoid using my "teacher voice," that slow and over-enunciated tone and cadence of the teacher who had given her lesson a million times before and for whom the ideas no longer hold any magic.

I do not often reflect on how much influence we teachers really hold over our charges. As much as I think about my students, each of them, in some capacity, spends 45 minutes a day thinking about me. Every student has that teacher whose class they look back on as an adult and see there some moment of recognition that had left a mark on their own identities. Miss Brodie is that teacher. But Muriel Spark doesn't seem to think that teacher was all she was cracked up to be.

The fabric of this novel is about the ways that that role of the teacher is not only performative, but a screen against the real individual, and the way that being a teacher might provide an opportunity to appear, both to others, and to yourself, as other than you are. Miss Brodie's set, from the opening pages of the novel, move through the story realizing that pieces of the Renaissance statue of her image are chipping away all the time, finally to reveal that Miss Brodie may never have had a prime at all.

The Prime ... would be a delightful little book. Except for the fact that it is far too serious to be delightful and that there is nothing little about the social commentary it offers. Throughout the story, frequent mentions of the fact that Sandy, a sort of leader in the set, will ultimately betray Miss Brodie, make the tone feel almost ominous. As she looks back on her years at Marcia Blaine, Sandy begins to realize that Miss Brodie may never have had a prime at all:

She thought of Miss Brodie eight years ago sitting under the elm tree telling her first simple love story and wondered to what extent it was Miss Brodie who had developed complications throughout the years, and to what extent it was her own conception of Miss Brodie that had changed.

This is the central question of the novel, and a question that I ask myself quite seriously: when is our understanding of someone else more about ourselves than it is about them?

I am not sure if this is a novel more about teacherhood or studentship, but it is certainly, from this teacher's point of view, an important commentary on how we see ourselves and how we hope to be seen. And there is some intimation that if we are honest on both counts, some ugliness may be revealed.

The tale is not, however, without its joys. And it does, at the same time that it troubles me, reaffirm for me how magical childhood is, and how lucky I am to have a part in the world of school and of children. As Sandy and Jenny sit down, early in the story, to a birthday, tea, Spark offers this gem:

To Sandy the unfamiliar pineapple had the authentic taste and appearance of happiness ... and she thought the sharp taste on her tongue was that of a special happiness, which was nothing to do with eating, and was different from the happiness of play that one enjoyed unawares.

Though it is rare, there is some opportunity for authentic happiness, even though that happiness might occasionally require a little imagination.

Back to my original point: this book felt like it was about me. And I'm not sure if I'm Miss Brodie or if I'm Sandy, but, in the end, Art teacher Teddy Lloyd tells Sandy:

"You are too analytical and irritable for your age."

Story of my life.

Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr.

If you are the type of reader who would never pick up a book with an exclamation point in the title, then this is the book for you!

Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr. breaks a lot of guidelines that I usually drill into my students' brains in September as the cardinal rules (or at least my cardinal pet peeves) of writing: don't use punctuation to speak for you instead of words, writing in second person doesn't work, use past tense, not present, to tell a story. And it breaks them so successfully and so convincingly that I began to reconsider not only these petty conventions of writing but a million more significant ones as well.

The story of Junior Thibodeau, boy-genius who knows from birth that the world will end when he is 36, never did what I expected it to do. The redemption I expected at the ended turned out to really be more anti-redemption. And that, I believe, is the point: nothing is neat or pretty and nothing lasts. And everything matters because nothing really matters at all.

With the portentous destruction of the Challenger when Junior is in elementary school on one end and the inevitable actual end of the world on the other, Junior's life feels like a cataclysm in and of itself, even without the whole countdown-to-annihilation thing. Junior is paralyzed by his insight and tormented by ... pretty much everything.

Much of the story is narrated by The Voices (emphasis mine) who, from his birth, provide Junior with not only the precise date, time, and astronomic statistics of the impending Armageddon, but also a wide number of other truths and advice, complete with admonitions about, suggestions for, and criticisms of Junior's decisions. The Voices come across as part omniscient narrator, part Hal the Computer, and part interior monologue. Since they address Junior directly, they also made me feel like I was Junior. And, even though Junior might actually be crazy, seeing as he hears voices and all, I am pretty sure that I, and probably a lot of other neurotic-twenty-to-thirty-somethings, actually am Junior in some important ways.

As counterpoint to Junior's angst-ridden and drug-addled life, his father, John Sr., was for me Currie's most convincing evidence in support of the assertion of the title. As a rule I wouldn't say that father-son relationships are a particular area of interest for me. But John Sr. is so solid, simple, straightforward, and strong that he makes Junior's fractured internal life ridiculous and tragic. There's a sense that if only Junior could see things his dad's way, he wouldn't have nearly so many problems. Just listen to this:

John Sr. meets his hero, baseball player Ted Williams, and he explains:

And it was one of the great moments of my life, walking with Ted William's arm around my shoulders, right up there with my boys being born.

John Sr., a man who works three jobs because he simply can't stand inaction, has a moment of such pure paternal love for his ridiculous son that it made me want to hit Junior over the head. And cry. In a good way.

Later, The Voices put a finer point on the difference between Junior and his sainted dad:

In fact it seems true, at least in this case, that great intellectual capacity (that is, Junior's) can sometimes be a handicap, because we're pretty certain that someone of average intelligence would have this figured out fairly quickly ...

The narration is punctuated with these offhand articulations of simple truths that are in no way aphoristic or trite. And while The Voices by no means coddle Junior, they do provide insightful, if unhelpful, advice suggesting ways Junior should just get over himself already.

Amy, the unsuspecting and for the most part of the book unwilling Juliet to Junior's doomed Romeo, also provides good ballast for the bobbing vessel of his psyche, and grants him some grace, especially by the end.

At one point, Amy asks herself:

But what does being an adult teach you, daily, if not how to function in the face of fear?

And, unlike Junior, Amy seems to have found a way:

Move your feet, I tell myself, and I manage one slow step, then another.

This is the magic of the story: somehow, even the most incredibly complex, messed up things in life have a very simple solution that diffuses their significance at the same time that it underlines how deeply important they are. Currie is talented enough that he can say things like "Love, in its purest form, is biology" and have it sound, not cynical, but reassuring.

As they grow ever closer to the end of the world, Amy tells Junior a story about a cross-country drive she made in college. She tells Junior:

I had decided to take the long route through the South. And do you know why I went so far out of my way?

Here, The Voices interject:

You do not. We could tell you, but listen:

Amy goes on:

Because someone had told me about these flowers in Texas that I just had to see. Bluebonnets ... Said it would change my life. And I guess my life felt like it needed changing at the time, because I went to Texas instead of just shooting straight across the plains.

The experience of reading this book was complicated and joyful and left me feeling resolute. To do what, not sure. But definitely to remember that things matter.

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England by Brock Clarke

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England by Brock Clarke is the perfect start-off-summer-reading-strong choice.

As long as you don't mind coming off of your first summer read feeling not-so-warm-and-fuzzy.

The title of this novel (the brilliant title) suggested to me that the novel would be quite funny, with lots of literary inside jokes about Emily Dickinson and H.D. Thoreau to make us literary-types feel oh-so-clever and smug when we're done.

Not so much.

Instead, it reminded more of a John Irving novel (see the Must List), though with fewer perverted sex acts ending in violence.

What I mean by this is that as the protagonist bumbles his way through the plot (and I use this word intentionally, more on that later) this reader was led to wonder, "is there anything worse that can happen to this guy?" And, as with Irving, the answer is always yes.

Sam Pulsifer is an unreliable narrator to make Gene Forrester look downright dependable. (Click that link; I find it hilarious.) Sam pulls frequent Jane Eyres in attempts to explain himself to his audience, but his reassurances just made me trust him less. So the first-person Arsonist's Guide may be Sam's autobiography, it may be his novel, or it may be his autobiography ghost-written by a group of bond analysts with whom he spent ten years in minimum-security prison who now seek to blackmail him in order to turn a profit off of his disastrous misadventures. Half-way through the novel, Sam is approached by Morgan and G-off, the aforementioned bond analysts, who petition him:

Morgan said, "We want you to tell us how to burn down houses like the one you burned down. And after we do, we can write a book about it."

"An Arsonist's Guide to Writer's Homes in New England," G-off said. "We've already come up with the title."

Yeah.

So there's literal arson in this story, but I think, (and this is what makes me like it/bothers me about it) that its really much more about whether or not stories themselves should all be torched, since Sam/Brock seems to think they mostly just cause problems anyhow. Sam burns down a house, yes, and many other literary abodes go up in smoke throughout the novel, but Sam contends that it was a story that was actually to blame for the accidental conflagration that killed two people and changed the course of his life.

Rather than using literary allusion to make us readers feel like cool insiders, Brock instead mocks every piece of reading culture us book-bloggers hold dear. Sam encounters a Lit prof who doesn't "believe in literature,"an English teacher who is through with books, a book club that discusses everything but, and a late-night meeting of men and women dressed as witches and wizards whom he fears are Wiccans but turn out to be clutching "one of those children's books out of England." (Incidentally, Brock uses overwhelmingly famous examples of literary popular culture without naming them several times; a trick that I found particularly delightful.)

The professor and the teacher have shunned books because, as the professor puts it, she "[doesn't] want to be a character in the book my students are reading." She goes on, "I don't want to be the hard-bitten character who had endured tragedy and come out a better, more sympathetic person" (148). They seem to have been so negatively affected by books that they need to literally escape from them.

On the other hand, the even crazier book clubbers and wizards seem to operate under the delusion that there is something to be found in fiction that might actually make their lives better. They don't need the book so much as they need the object of the book to give themselves a place to put their problems. As the witches and wizards depart from their late night meeting, "there was a long sincere discussion about how very magical fog was and how they'd be sure to wake up their kids ... to show them the fog ... and then they'd compare the literary fog and the meteorological fog ..." (174). It's obvious Sam thinks this is a pretty dumb idea.

If all of this is confusing, well, yeah, it is. I have no idea what side Sam/Brock/the bond analysts want us to come down on. As the judge who sentenced Sam asks during his trial,

"Can a story be good only if it produces an effect? If the effect is a bad one, but intended, has the story done its job? Is it then a good story? If the story produces an effect other than the intended one, is it then a bad story?"

Not to be too cute, but I haven't decided if this novel is a good story or a bad story. But it's worth spending time reading either way.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

With all due respect for the friend who recommended it to me, I am hard pressed to figure out why The Elegance of the Hedgehog is at the top of the New York Times best-sellers list. I suspect it is one of those books that lots of people buy because it is trendy and then never finish.

But maybe I'm missing something.

The novel is full of the types of maudlin, pseudo-philosophic sentences I would have copied into my diary when I was in high school:

In the split second while I saw the stem and the bud drop to the counter I intuited the essence of Beauty ... Oh my gosh, I thought, does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance?

Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea.

I will admit there is a slightly yogic quality to the novel. But it feels so heavy-handed it's hard to enjoy. Narrated by two alternating and supposedly kindred souls, the book is inconsistant, and this lack of integrity of voice makes it tiresome at times -- I felt myself rushing through one narrator to get on to the other.

Of the two narrators, Madame Renee Michel, concierge at number 7, rue de Grenelle, takes the novel to a higher plane. She, indeed, lives the mindful life amateur yogis aspire to.

But Paloma Joss, the "introspective" 12-year-old, rings false. Her reflections on the inferiority of all those around her are so predictably jaded that its exhausting. Worst of all, her voice appears in a different font -- a pet peeve of mine, and a bit of an insult to the reader, as though the voices are not sufficiently different to make the point of view clear.

Yes, the novel is a meditation on friendship. And perhaps it's simply because I spend so much time in the teen world, as a teacher of middle schoolers, that I found Paloma's voice so tiring. But her narration keeps the very adult portions of the book anchored to a far more narrow view of the world.

The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Juot Diaz

At the risk of sounding politically incorrect, obese teenagers (see She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb) and repressive Central American regimes are two subjects that I do not particularly enjoy reading about. Obese teenagers depress me and repressive regimes highlight my ignorance regarding world history in a manner that makes me uncomfortable. But Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao describes the politics of the Dominican Republic so clearly, and is so compassionate and funny regarding Oscar and his dieting woes that neither of my hang-ups got in the way of the intensely moving experience of reading this book.

Somehow, family myth and political repression become one in this story, leaving Oscar strangely, yet effectively, peripheral. Narrated primarily by Junior, Oscar's sometime-roommate and Oscar's older sister Lola's sometime-lover, the book tells the story of the de Leon family and their "fuku," the family's word for, as Junior describes it in the novel's first pages, "the Curse and Doom of the New World."

The thing about the novel is that while it is, in many ways, the family saga you'd expect, the emotional impact is epic even beyond the extensive scope of the plot. Though it is about a family, to me this book is really about the de Leon women: their legendary beauty, their guts, their bodies, and their minds. Junior's casual, macho, street-smart voice, along with his persona as a self-professed womanizer make the stories of these formidable yet seemingly cursed women overwhelmingly powerful. Junior uses women in his life with a blatantly casual disregard, but he tells the stories of Lola and her ancestors with palpable respect.

Through Junior's frame narrative, it becomes clear that he is telling the story of a family to which he does not belong because its stories have impacted him enough to bring him to change his life entirely. It is his voice, and the seeming incongruity between his world view and the stories of the de Leon women, that is so unexpectedly moving. Paradoxically, Diaz manages to use a man's voice to give the women in the novel the real power.

This entry is about three years late, I guess, but I hope that my initial resistance to the novel underlines just how highly I recommend it.