In One Person / John Irving

I've read enough John Irving books by now that I think it's safe to say that if you pick up nearly any of his novels, you will inevitably find one or more of these motifs in it:

• boarding school
• wrestling
• the Northeast
• Austria
• fatherhood issues (usually involving an unknown father)
• the narrator's reflection on his life from the vantage of old age
• the Bildungsroman (a coming-of-age novel)

I say that not to deter you from his stories, which are wonderfully written, but to point out that it takes a talented author to keep things fresh when he repeatedly returns to what are obviously subjects that are dear to his heart. Irving makes them dear to you, too, with his trademark storyteller's touch and his subtle but incisive sense of humor.

You'll find all of his favorite motifs in full force in his latest novel, In One Person (FIC IRVING and AD FIC IRVING). The protagonist, writer Billy Abbott, reflects on his life and and how it has shaped his sexual identity as well as the other way around — how his sexual identity has shaped his life.

Billy, we soon learn, is a bisexual man; he is attracted to both men and women. As a boy growing up in a small Vermont town, he struggles with the notion that he has "crushes on the wrong people." He grapples perhaps most of all with his infatuations with the callous but charismatic star of the wrestling team at his school, First River Academy, as well as with the town librarian, the mysterious Miss Frost. So it's no surprise that Billy's interactions with both his objects of desire prove unerringly formative.

Irving populates his story with a colorful cast of characters, each of whom leave their mark on Billy Abbott: The caustic Winthrop women of Billy's family and their patient, genial husbands, including the cross-dressing Grandpa Harry. There's Billy's best friend Elaine and her compassionate, unflappable mother Mrs. Hadley. Even Billy's biological father, curiously absent from his life, plays a role.

We follow Billy as he makes his way in the world, from small-town New England to Austria to the Big Apple. Irving does not shirk from exploring the HIV epidemic of the 1980s and the heartbreak it inflicts on Billy and many of his friends. We see Billy in his many forms: a writer, a lover, a friend, a son, a man — a person of many facets, his sexuality being but one of them.

Of Human Bondage / by W. Somerset Maugham

William Somerset Maugham was actually born in France in 1874 as the son of an English diplomatic lawyer living in Paris. His father, knowing that any child born on French soil could be conscripted into military service at any point during his or her lifetime, arranged for William to actually be born inside the British Embassy compound. Soon after Maugham was enrolled by his parents in an English boarding school where, like his three elder brothers, he was expected to begin his studies which would see him follow the path of his father into law. His formative years were anything but happy however as the early deaths of both his parents made for difficult, isolated upbringing. Turning to writing after dabbling in a medical career, Maugham penned his most famous novel, Of Human Bondage, a semi-autobiographical fable of a young man's wanderings through life, in 1915. The book brought mixed critical feelings but popular mainstream success at the time and has remained among the classics of early twentieth century literature.

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"Art," he continued, with a wave of the hand, "is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life." (p. 174)
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With the death of his mother and father only a few months apart, 9-year-old Philip Carey is sent to live with relatives in the small village of  Blackstable where his uncle, a the local parson, assumes his guardianship. Though he has inherited a small fortune from his parents, the money is held in custody by his uncle until Philip reaches the age of twenty-one, a situation making the youth's early days at the vicarage a bit difficult. It's not long before he's sent to Tercanbury, a boarding school where things are much worse as his shyness and club foot make fitting in a difficult task. Philip is a good student though and having demonstrated considerable academic prowess during his time at Tercanbury, he earns a scholarship for clerical studies at Oxford which he promptly turns down (to the grievance of his uncle and headmaster) for a chance to study in Germany at the prestigious Heidelberg University. It's here at home amidst the intellectual crowd who open his mind to a more idealized world that Philip gradually turns his back on the stiff, institutionalized values of his upbringing and focuses his time and energy on cultivating a profession and lifestyle of his own choosing.
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Upon returning home to England eager to rebel against convention, Philip meets a middle-aged family friend named Miss Wilkinson whose open flirtatiousness and evident availability startle the younger man initially. He's not attracted to Miss Wilkinson but rather likes the idea of carrying on an affair and is complicit as her lover out of little more than caprice. It's not so much fun once Philip finds out how deep her attachment is to him. In part to offset the undesirable conditions of the affair, Philips goes to London to try his hand as an accounting and later to Paris to study art where he meets and shares a genuine friendship with Fanny Price, yet another woman who has an unrequited affection for him. Realizing that Philip will never love her, the pennyless Fanny commits suicide prompting Philip to return to London to pursue a career in medicine, his late father's field. Things are little better in the city where medical school proves to be a tough order and Philip runs into more women trouble when he falls in love with a cockney waitress named Mildred. The encounter leads to a series perturbing problems for Philip. Over the next few years Mildred and a steady stream of other women seem to have a way of keeping Philip 'bound' to a life of strife and complications, circumstances which slowly force the young man (now growing older) to come to terms with his exotic ambitions and lofty philosophical ideals.
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Every place is the same. This abiding principle, along with other circular themes like man's search for meaning, the quest for fulfillment, and the nature of desire, comprise this masterfully delivered novel, truly one of the treasures of twentieth century fiction. All of the sequences, all of Philip's thoughts and encounters, his convictions and introspections, are carefully articulated in reverberating, yet poignant style by Maugham who no doubt exorcises some of his own demons with the effort. His protagonist Philip is every bit a modern 'everyman', and, in that respect, a proverbial 'everyman' foreseeing a world of opportunity and self-manifestation absent the psychological pitfall of failure. He's not absurdly naieve or an especially self-deluded individual, just someone discontented with not knowing. It's not until he's exhausted his ambitions, his plans and found only futility in wayward relationships that his ideals are inevitably deconstructed and put away in the final pages. "He had lived always in the future, and the present always, always had slipped through his fingers. His Ideals? He thought of his desire to make a design, intricate and beautiful, out of the myriad, meaningless facts of life: had he not seen also that the simplest pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect? It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories." (p. 564). (FIC MAUGHAM)

Lake of Dead Languages / by Carol Goodman

It's been 20 years since Jane Hudson has been home; both to her hometown in upstate New York and remnants of a rather dismal childhood but also to Heart Lake Academy, the prestigious all-girls prep school she attended on scholarship. Now after marrying, having a child, and separating from her husband, Jane along with her 4-year-old daughter Olivia has returned to the school as an interim teacher of Latin. Heart Lake, both the school and the actual lake it sits on, carries a distinctively tragic history, one which includes Jane at an especially personal level. In the early part of the institution's existence, three sisters, all daughters of the school's founder Iris Crevecouer were drowned in the lake together one night, their bodies never found. Ever since then the school has endured the legacy of the Crevecoeur Curse--untimely deaths and accidents involving subsequent students attributed to the dour 'legend of the lake'. Jane's arrival marks the sixtieth year since the Crevecouer girls deaths. It's also twenty years since the calamitous events of Jane's senior year when her two roommates Dierdre and Lucy along with a male friend, Lucy's brother Matt, drowned during a bizarre incident over the Christmas holiday, the circumstances surrounding each's death still a mystery.

Almost immediately upon Jane's return, strange things begin happening. At first, it's just a set of eery coincidences like Olivia's odd ability to maneuver over rocks on the lake without getting her shoes wet, or misplaced items in the classroom turning up in totally random places. But after pages from Jane's old, thought-to-be-lost diary begin mysteriously reappearing, intended for only her to find and possibly as a threat, it's obvious that something really, really weird is going on. The death of another student--dredged up in the lake though officially ruled a suicide--forces the focus fully into the context of Heart Lake's "curse" as buried secrets are unearthed and treacherous dealings push Jane to the forefront of the drama as the story nears its stunning climax.

Goodman's debut novel is a winner. An intricately plotted and captivating tale, it inevitably draws the reader into the story as the dark and shocking secrets of Jane's adolescence and the implications placed on her life now erect a fascinating scenario. Told in flashback mode with alternate chapters returning the story to the present, the reader becomes immersed in the murky world of youth and innocence, passion, guilt and restrained instinct. Sexual rites of passage, pagan rituals and forbidden love all come together as the author brilliantly meshes legend, myth and reality into an evocative tale of deception, misinterpretation, long-buried secrets and upheld lies.

The Crazy School / by Cornelia Read

26-year-old Madeline Dare may be a former debutante, but she’s hardly living a glamorous lifestyle currently as a history teacher at an alternative boarding school in western Massachusetts. An institution for at-risk kids and--in Madeline's case--court appointed teachers, much of her time at the Santangelo Academy is spent keeping her mentally disturbed pupils from going off in expectantly unpredictable ways. Still she’s popular with the kids, her toned-down rebellious streak and neverending supply of 60's reminisces (book is set in 1989) never failing to resonate with students, and warrant some backbiting from the other, less-liked faculty in the process.

When a student, Fay Perry, becomes pregnant by her boyfriend Mooney LaChance, Madeline is the only one to know of their predicament just prior to both kids sudden and shocking death by poisoning. Despite the hush-hush attitude assumed by the school’s eccentric headmaster, David Santangelo, along with much of the faculty, Madeline knows something’s amiss and becomes determined to have the truth realized even if it means being implicated in the ongoing investigation. Of course her part-time sleuthing’s not so popular with everyone, evident when certain "accidents" start to befall Madeline at seemingly every turn. Finding herself in too deep to back out now, Madeline must fight not only solve the mystery of the poisoned teens, but to clear her name and preserve her reputation in the process.

Cornelia Read's second Madeline Dare novel dishes out some serious attitude accompanying its heroine as she strives to peg the real menace at Santangelo Academy. Along the way, she encounters some particularly disturbing, off-the-wall characters at what could almost pass as a halfway house for the underaged. It's a place where curious, compelling and downright dangerous episodes are merely an on-the-job hazard. It's also what makes this a perfect 'read' (no pun intended) for fans of whodunit capers and amateur sleuth novels. (MYS READ)