THE OPTIMISTS

An English teacher, now immobilized by a stroke, recalls his star pupil.

John Keating’s edgy first-person narrative jumps around over the decades from 1987 to 2021, studded with brilliant character sketches. Chief among them are Keating’s fellow teacher and former girlfriend, Enid Smeal, a dedicated artist with little time for personal interactions; her awkward son, Jacob; the boy’s classmate Clara Hightower, serious and calm beyond her years; and smarmy Richard Kingsley Madison IV, head of St. George’s, the private K-8 school where Keating teaches. Richy, as Keating delights in cheekily calling him, is obsessed with improving St. George’s endowment and reputation. Key to this goal is Clara, who first comes to Keating’s attention at Jacob’s 6th birthday party and by the time she arrives in his 8th grade classroom is clearly brilliant and destined for success that Richy hopes will burnish the school’s reputation. Jacob, smart but resolutely underperforming in school and uncomfortable in social situations, becomes her unlikely boyfriend and, after she breaks up with him when they’re headed for separate high schools, painfully in love with her for the rest of his life. As he chronicles their adult lives and his own marriage, Keating sprinkles an often sad story with knock-knock jokes and other forms of humor, frequently pausing to explain why they’re funny—“Telling people why things are funny can be funny too,” he asserts. We come to realize that under his sardonic exterior he is a ferociously dedicated teacher whose mocking self-assessment (“I am desperate for notice.…[I] created a world where I could be the king of my own tiny realm”) masks genuine love and concern for his students. The circumstances leading to his stroke are eventually revealed, as is Clara’s unexpected post-school trajectory, but what will stick with readers most are the multi-dimensional portraits of complicated, flawed human beings, most notably the novel’s narrator.

Keening, darkly funny, and gruffly tender.