Lucifer With a Book

Having greatly admired the author’s previous hook, The Gallery, perhaps the most exciting first novel of 1047,1 came to this one with high expectations, and found it a considerable letdown. The setting is a private school. The theme is that much — everything in fact — is amiss with American education, a few of the ills being: reactionary trustees and principals who run a school as if it were a corporation; toadying to wealthy parents; glorification of sport at the expense of study; “tests” in place of humanism; jockeying for promotion, incompetence, and sexual frustration on the part of the teachers.

While sympathetic to what Burns has to say, I found his frenzied way of saying it disconcerting. His Academy is quite the nastiest school in twentieth-century literature, too nasty to be wholly credible. (The imaginative homosexual orgies among the students would, surely, have required more than the available privacy.) The hero is our old friend the angry veteran, “a sort of smashed idealist” and a singularly surly one. The girl is a beautiful language teacher suffering from a case of prolonged virginity.

There are a number of biting portraits and some good scenes in the book, but too much of it consists of stereotypes and righteous indignation.