Schooling

Rating:
Summary: Not an easy read, but well worth the effort
Review: A brand new style of coming of age novel. Heather McGowan deserves kudos, as do her publishers, for the bravery it took to select this book as a first novel. It's not an easy read, written in stream of consciousness with minimal paragraphing and punctuation. After reading maybe 5 pages, I admit I flipped through the rest of the book to see if it was ALL written like this (it was), then sighed and figured I was in for 'an experience.' One reviewer suggested reading it aloud, and I tried that with a page or two: it works very well. You have to be in a certain frame of mind to fall under the spell of this book - relaxed, trusting, and open to new experiences. When you get tripped up, as I did and as you will, with the lyricism of the writing in long looping-back-upon-themselves sentences, don't stop and reread - just go for it, keep reading along and letting the music and images carry you on this journey between childhood and adolescence.
Okay. Enough about the style of the writing (experimental, I think, describes it well). The story is great. Catrine, a 13yo from Maine whose mother has recently died, is sent to a boarding school north of London that her father went to during WWII. He reminisces with her about the wonderful experiences he had there and about the excellent education she can expect to receive.
Catrine, however, has a different experience, exposed to hazing, cruelty, cynicism, and the difficulty of always living as an outsider. She is troubled by the realization that she and a friend from her childhood may have caused a death, and she is confused by her the attentions shown to her by Mr. Gilbert, her chemistry teacher and the one person who seems to consider her special. Good stuff.
I'll be curious to see in what style McGowan writes her next book.

Rating:
Summary: Maybe its just me...
Review: but this book made no sense at all. I couldn't understand anything. I made it through the first couple of pages and couldn't go any further. It was awful. Maybe its just me, but this book was very poorly written, and I can't understand how it ever got published in the first place.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful
Review: I read this book when it was first released, it did not make a great impact on me immediately, but over time "Schooling" has reappeared in my thoughts numerous times. So, I had to write this review after reading that miserable griping below. Yes this book can seem a bit pretentious (i.e. inaccessible) at times, but "Schooling" is nonetheless fey, witty, and unforgettable. Yes, fey and witty. No kidding. This is not your typical coming of age adolescent girl coming of age novel about (...) boyfriends. Thankfully, McGowan's heroine is clever and vulnerable-- and the adults (her father, a teacher who has an inappropriate interest in her) surrounding her possess a combination of longing and nostalgia that is at times heartbreaking. And the other kids in the novel are, well, like kids. funny, brutal, smart, goofy. like we all were or are at one time or another. Yes there are moments when McGowan's words will seem foggy, you may need to re-read a passage here and there, but it is ultimately rewarding. A beautiful novel. Buy it and put a little money in this wonderful novelist's pocket so she will write another.

Rating:
Summary: as good as literary fiction gets these days
Review: I wrote the starred review of Schooling in Booklist Magazine (you can read it above in the 'editorial reviews' section), and I have to take issue with people who say that the book is too difficult, or that it offers little in the way of ample rewards. Schooling was as good as any first novel I can remember reading in all of my time reviewing at Booklist.

The complaint that's always made about literary fiction, and that has been leveled at everyone since James Joyce, is that it's just pure ostentation, a sort of "look ma no hands" linguistic showmanship. That's not, however, why McGowan's book is difficult. The book is difficult to read -- at least at first -- because it is an entirely refreshing reading experience. Because the novel's central character Catrine, is young, and because she is scared and small and growing into an understanding of herself, she is inarticulate.

But despite her inability to articulate words or thoughts, we come to know Catrine very intimately, and MacGowan manages to make her inarticulate thoughts and words the stuff of great literary fiction.

The book can be difficult to read, because it is unlike most books (more challenging in structure than even, say, DFW's Infinite Jest). But eventually McGowan gets you inside Catrine's head, and once that happens, it's no different than any other absorbing reading experience.

Is there adequate payoff for the challenge? I'd say so. I'd say that Ms. McGowan is an enormous literary talent, that her explorations of memory, childhood, and life ont he outside are as compelling as any I've read. If the final message fails to deliver a knock out punch to some readers, I'd say that maybe that's because the messages we can garner from living and schooling are, like Catrine, utterly inarticulate.

Rating:
Summary: Awesome!!!!! to the max!
Review: I'll admit that at times this book was confusing, but it was still excellent. The writing style was really different, ex. no quotation marks, run-on sentences, but as long as you're paying attention, it's not too hard to follow. I LOVED this book!!!!!!!

Rating:
Summary: No Nut!
Review: It seems nutty to compare this book to Joyce's work, but in no other contemporary writer of fiction in English has dialogue been so wonderfully inflated to an entire artful form all its own. Here's a new talent truly worthy of watching!

Rating:
Summary: pretentious
Review: The style this book is written in is pretentious blabber mimicking as art - I read a book a week and so consider myself well-read and literate but this is too much. A few pages is ok if written this way, a whole book? more than I want to bother with, there are better things to do than wonder where the quotation marks are supposed to be.

Rating:
Summary: Read this book aloud
Review: Try reading this book aloud if you're having any difficulty reading it to yourself. Once you actually engage your speaking voice you'll find that McGowan's prose style really blooms and shines. It's an uncanny experience; the melodies and rhythms of her sentences are extremely sophisticated and draw you in like a cello suite. After reading Gert Hofmann's "Luck" and Eliza Minot's "The Tiny One" (both, like "Schooling," use children as narrators)I'd have to say she's by far the better of the three at handling this difficult narrative technique. I can't wait to read her next novel.