SCHOOLING

A first novel packed to the bursting point with verbal and novelistic skills—and yet the whole misses being sustaining.

American Catrine Evans is 14 (or almost) when she comes to the English boarding school Monstead—the same school her Welsh-born father, back in the 1940s, attended. Immediately, the reader is immersed in a shifting, often near–stream-of-consciousness, narrative that doesn’t so much provide eventfulness—sniffing glue, trying false eyelashes in a shop, watching cricket, rehearsing a play—as release floods of the atmosphere and ambiance of school, of other students—male and female—and staff, including the suspiciously strait-laced Mr. Betts (English) and the nice Mr. Gilbert (chemistry) who “rescues” Catrine by taking her home for toast and tea when he finds her alone out in the cold—seemingly lost in a state of the hyper-meditativeness that occupies much of her time: for Catrine comes to Monstead trailing clouds of fear and trauma, partly due to her mother’s death six months previously, in Maine, and partly to her sickening belief that, with another girl, she may have caused a traffic accident and killed a man. Both traumas, however, albeit woven conscientiously through the brocade-like riches of McGowan’s many-worded imaginings, get gradually left behind as the greater theme of Mr. Gilbert’s mentor-like friendship for Catrine emerges, includes museum outings, art instruction (Mr. Gilbert also paints), finally even a weekend visit to his childhood home to visit his mother—as all the while question-knives are silently sharpened, being readied to ask what the nature of Mr. Gilbert’s (he’s 34) interest really is . . . . Guessing can do no harm, as neither can hinting, though it can be said, in spite of a long Molly-Bloomish stream plugged in for cloture, that the end far from lives up to the book.

Remarkable in its mature complexity of method and manner, though less so in its substance: a minor book crying to be let out of the trappings of a major one.