By Heather McGowan
Faber and Faber, 314 pages
Available at Page One
Heather McGowan comes to the reader with a full-blown style that is nearly impenetrable upon first encounter, but soon becomes awfully familiar. That’s because it’s James Joyce’s style.
But no matter. The use of literary devices pioneered by Joyce in Ulysses – chapters rendered as pages of a play, stream-of-consciousness internal monologue, loose punctuation, onomatopoeia –have long been fair game. If Faulkner can get away with it, so can McGowan, who tells the tale of 13-year-old Catrine Evans, an American girl set loose in an English boarding school.
Catrine is precocious and peculiar, a lot like the young girl rendered on the cover of Schooling by the painter Balthus. Sent by her Welsh dad to Monstead, his old alma mater, after her American mum dies, Catrine soon gets into all sorts of mischief, from taking nude photos of her classmates to accidentally igniting the chemistry lab. These details are rendered in an impressionistic, almost telegraphic style which, yes, reminds one of Joyce. But it’s clear McGowan is working toward a modern-day sensibility in her characterization of Catrine:
My father says I do things without thinking of the consequences… she replaces the pebble.
Well I think considering the consequences sounds very boring. A tame life, indeed. What if flies considered the consequences? There wouldn’t be any carnivorous plants. Would you prefer to be mundane or to have the colors of a Venus flytrap?
As noted previously, they come to you armed with overcoats and questions, demanding answers you are content without.
Well?
I’d prefer not to be eaten.
The inquisitor here is Mr. Gilbert, a chemistry professor who has caught Catrine’s eye, or vice versa. The two play an ongoing game of master/pupil, hunter/prey that reverses itself on several occasions, revealing the older and wiser instructor to be as confused and lost as his younger study. Catrine is poised somewhere between art and science: her proclivity toward art – taking nude photos – gets her placed in Gilbert’s after-school chemistry lab with a red-haired girl named Aurora, who turns out to be a pyromaniac. So much for science.
If any of this reminds you of your Catholic-school days, then you might enjoy’s Schooling’s loosely-plotted exercises in stylistics. It takes getting used to. McGowan is an American writer who also penned the screenplay to Tadpole, a recent independent film starring Sigourney Weaver about older women who hunt up younger men. Schooling is a more conventional reverse of this: an older male teacher who ensnares a young girl, under the pretext of giving her an "education." Don’t expect lots of racy bits, though, because Gilbert, when all is said and done, is a bit of a coward and a tease. The cool-eyed Catrine seems more worldly in comparison.
As mentioned, Schooling showcases McGowan’s style, which can be comic at times, quite taxing at others. Nothing earthshaking happens in the novel, which leaves you feeling the effort has not been greatly rewarded. One long passage delves into Catrine’s dream state, dragging in Hamlet and Ophelia and suggesting Bloom’s Nightworld sequence from Ulysses (though to lesser effect).
You learn a lot, eventually, about Catrine’s relationship to her father: How he came with Monstead, how he came to marry an American woman. You learn about Catrine’s lingering guilt over a childhod prank perpetrated with a friend in the States: the two rolled an old tire onto a busy street, upending a motorcyclist. Catrine thinks the man died in the accident, causing her to be morose and mysterious at Monstead.
There’s some questionable physics in Schooling, like the character who fires a bullet which ricochets off a lawn mower, boomerangs back, and injures himself. Could this really happen? You’d have to ask a physicist, not a fictionist. All in all, Schooling is an impressionistic performance that could use a little more discipline, a clearer focus on story and realism, and a little less attention to punctuation and verbal gymnastics. But, like Catrine, McGowan is probably one to watch out for in the future.