A Good School by Richard Yates Reviewed by Kadzi Mutizwa ISBN-10: 0312420390
What is it about mid-20th-century, all-male, New England prep schools that inspires so much literary consideration? A Good School joins that crowded field, but evokes more contemporary resonance than other members of the pack. Less dark than John Knowles’s A Separate Peace, with characters less affected and easier to relate to than those in Tobias Wolff’s Old School, Yates paints these boys as more or less comfortable with their mediocrity—less concerned with catapulting into the Ivy League, and more intent on throwing themselves into void-filling relationships with their fellow sexually frustrated classmates. The setting is Dorset Academy—a third-rate Connecticut boarding school (on the brink of financial ruin) with a reputation for not much more than “believ[ing] in individuality.” Yet many of its denizens veer more toward conformity by the chapter. Take the lead protagonist, Bill Grove, for example—a “chronic loser” who unceremoniously ascends to editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, in spite of failing grades. He concertedly ingratiates himself with the pair of resident student intellectuals and takes up smoking to avoid future humiliation as “the fool of the Senior Club,” losing his underdog charm and feeling more like a rising politician than a journalist at the start of each term. Dorset’s instructors don’t seem any better off. Popular English teacher/dorm monitor Robert Driscoll pines for a campus dynamic that mirrors his own idyllic prep school experience. The school’s French teacher/Casanova extraordinaire decides to bow out of the teaching profession altogether, but not before trysting with the wife of an alcoholic, polio-stricken colleague. Top that off with an aloof headmaster and a charter that “had been written by a crazy old lady,” and it’s almost no wonder that this outfit ends up going “down and out like some sleazy little commercial venture.” The novel’s progression is entirely predictable: 18-year-olds with “no readiness for soldiering” enlist in the war, mini-nervous breakdowns are borne, hearts are broken, innocence is forever shattered. But Yates gets us there with an execution so sleek that it’s hard to mind another rehashing of this genre’s narrative formula—although he may not have conceived of the template, he’s managed to refine it. And with A Good School coming in at a relatively pithy 178 pages, he appears to have absorbed the advice of one of his character’s father: “When you’re talking . . . and I don’t care who it’s to or what it’s about, the important thing is knowing when to stop. Never say anything that doesn’t improve on silence.” The same wisdom can apply to the written word.
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Kadzi Mutizwa is a Midwesterner who currently lives and works in New York.
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