Small wonder so many novels are set at prep schools. As Sam Brandt, graduate of Connecticut's prestigious Leverett School and longtime Leverett English teacher, puts it in School Days, "It was human nature, wasn't it? Put warm bodies together in a sealed environment--a nunnery, a prison, a boarding school--and unnaturally intense attachments were bound to form." Jonathan Galassi's short but engulfing novel is about such attachments within and across generations, and particularly about the point when these attachments begin to reflect not steadfastness so much as stagnation.
School Days opens in October 2007 with the adult-directed equivalent of a note from the principal's office: Leverett's headmaster, Boris Krohn, has summoned Sam to discuss an unfortunate development. Ron Bryden, a former Leverett student who would have graduated with Sam and the class of '67 if Ron hadn't dropped out, has written to Boris requesting "a few amends" for the abuse perpetrated on him by "one of your star pedagogues, the ones you're always touting as embodying what makes a Leverett education so unique." A problem for Leverett becomes a problem for Sam when Boris asks him to do some digging into Ron's experience at the school, including his reason for leaving after two years.
For Sam and many of his classmates, Leverett, an all-boys school at the time, functioned as a safe-enough space to playact as gay adventurers; like Sam, most of the boys would go on to marry women, although School Days finds him separated from his wife of decades. Ron's letter has the effect of casting a pall over Sam's 40-year-old memories--they're inescapable once he gets Boris's assignment--of youthful sex with male partners and of camaraderie with school faculty: Might the "star pedagogue" Ron mentions have been one of Sam's beloved teachers? And what responsibility does Leverett bear now for what happened then?
Galassi, chairman of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and author of three poetry books and the novel Muse, crafts supple sentences with atavistic touches; young Sam "was the chump who actually believed the poems and pop songs and old nostrums." As for older Sam, readers may be moved to wonder if by staying true to Leverett, he wasn't so much affirming his past as guaranteeing that he would never have to grow up and face the possibility that love was, as a classmate once defined it, "no more or no less than unrequited lust." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer
Shelf Talker: In this big-impact little novel, a prep school graduate turned faculty member is asked to investigate a former classmate's allegation of abuse by a charismatic former teacher.