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.