December 22, 2014
In LeCraw’s wildly melodramatic sophomore novel (after The Swimming Pool), Charlie Garrett is a Southern boy who graduates from Harvard and finds a teaching position at the Abbott School in north-central Massachusetts. There, he meets Preston Bankhead, the school’s commanding chaplain, and his 12-year-old daughter, May, who is a student. Over the course of the next several years, May grows up and she and Charlie fall in love. But when May’s father is diagnosed with cancer, Charlie abruptly breaks things off. Ten years later, Charlie is still teaching at Abbott with May and his younger half-brother, Nicky. Charlie tries to bring Nicky and May together, but is unprepared for the consequences that follow. Then Charlie and Nicky’s widowed mother arrives at the school for Christmas. She winds up in the hospital, setting the stage for a series of events that will throw the past into clear relief. LeCraw has fashioned a contemporary novel that feels positively Victorian with its overuse of coincidence and deathbed confessions. The story takes place over the course of two decades, but Charlie, who narrates, never seems to age mentally, making it difficult for readers to get a fix on where they are in the story. Add a school scandal to the mix and this overstuffed, awkwardly plotted novel completely strains belief.
December 1, 2014
Incest, racial tension, statutory rape, alcoholism-LeCraw (The Swimming Pool, 2010) throws them all into the stew in this melodrama about family secrets and thwarted love among teachers at an elite New England prep school.Fresh out of Harvard, Charlie Garrett becomes an English teacher at the Abbott School in Abbottsford, Massachusetts (not to be confused with the actual Abbott Academy which merged with Andover in the 1970s). But Charlie isn't a typical blue blood. He knows little about his father, who he's been told died in Vietnam. His mother, Anita, moved from rural Georgia to Atlanta, where she worked as a nurse, when Charlie was a baby. When she married Hugh Satterthwaite, scion of one of Atlanta's most established families, Charlie became part of Atlanta's most exclusive community, though he never felt like he really fit in. Hugh, a devoted stepfather even after the birth of Charlie's much younger and more charismatic half brother, Nicky, got Charlie into Harvard before drinking himself to death, and Anita pushed Charlie to take the job at Abbott for reasons of her own. Charlie is drawn to chaplain Preston Bankhead, a fellow Southerner, and falls in love with Preston's daughter, May, nine years his junior. He doesn't act on his feelings while she's an Abbott student, but they correspond when she goes to college and begin an ardent affair when she comes home to take care of her father while he's dying of melanoma. But Charlie dumps May after Preston's funeral for reasons he won't share with her, and May leaves town. Charlie settles in to life as a bachelor teacher. Years later, Nicky, a Harvard grad who's been traumatized while doing relief work in Afghanistan, takes a job teaching at Abbott, to Charlie's delight. Then May returns to teach at Abbott as well. The last 50 pages become a rush of plot contrivances that undermine what until then has been a complicated, engrossing study of characters and relationships.
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Starred review from January 1, 2015
Armed with a degree in English literature from Harvard, a tawdry southern heritage straight out of Tennessee Williams, and no clear path in life, young Charlie Garrett lands a plum teaching assignment at a small New England prep school. Hoping to reinvent himself among the gentry and academic elite, he succeeds in being welcomed into the exalted scholarly community and taken under the wing of Preston Bankhead, the school's charismatic chaplain. Bankhead's daughter, May, is Charlie's student; then, years after her graduation, she becomes his lover when she returns to campus to care for her dying father. Their affair, however, cannot survive after Charlie's mother reveals a devastating secret from her past. Hamstrung by the complications of his mother's early life in Savannah, Charlie is nearly helpless when both May and his idolized half brother, Nick, join the faculty at Abbotsford and begin their own doomed relationship. With profound insights and through elegant, understated prose, LeCraw tells an intricate tale of loyalty and betrayal, secrets and truths, taking readers on a dreamlike journey into the heart of passion and the soul of family. In this exotic, emotive, and evocatively delicate novel, LeCraw brings southern gothic to staid New England in a tale reminiscent of books by Pat Conroy, Anne Rivers Siddons, Anne Tyler, and Donna Tartt.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)