JEAN

A quietly restless coming-of-age at a British boarding school for wayward boys in the summer of 1976.

We meet 17-year-old Jean, “Lord of Unluck,” as he receives a warning in the headmaster’s office of Compton Manor, the “House of Nutters,” his mother, Rosa, has sent him to after years of misadventures and expulsions. At Compton, Jean is an outsider among outsiders, his Jewish heritage and scholarship status ensuring his hackles stay up around the “the boys who are good at sport and who speak in loud, posh voices.” Among these lucky few is Tom, a popular boy who, in the final months of school, begins to seek Jean out for shared joints and other illicit intimacies. Their relationship is fenced in by secrecy—there are rumors, of course, about what an upper year boy might solicit from a younger student in the back toilets, but “none of this would be said aloud. No one is, nor ever will be, a faggot”—and time, as their final school year speeds to an end. Tom remains indistinct, to the reader as well as to Jean, which is part of the point; the novel, true to its title, is a meditation on Jean and the particular clockwork of his adolescent agony. The voice is a restrained third-person present-tense, its dialogue rendered without quotation marks. Dunnigan’s prose is carefully simple, and while some passages shimmer with piercing insight, the story can feel constrained by its own dedication to subtlety. The commitment to this austere mode makes the odd moments of clunky disclosure all the more jarring: metaphors made literal, realizations spelled out, pinches of traumatic memory reemerging just in time to contextualize destructive behavior. Even so, Jean is a compelling protagonist, his split-knuckled pursuit of a place in the world convincing in its sheer rawness.

Bruising, interesting, occasionally sublime.