School Days (2*)

 

I hope Jonathan Galassi's poetry is better than his barely disguised autofiction.  He's much better at describing "pillars of dust [rotating] in the drowsy air" than creating distinguishable characters in the groves of academe, aside from a smarmy administrator who very well could have flowed from Mary McCarthy's acid pen.  Set in the hot-house environment of an all-boys prep school in the 1960s--an era he barely bothers to evoke apart from the sexual segregation of the era--the novel examines, in muddled flashback, the intersection between pedagogy and pederasty from the perspective of a closet case. While conducive to nuance in theory, this approach instead walks the very fine line between today's castigating political correctness and a guilty recognition that this kind of sexual abuse has been tolerated since Plato as the price that often has been paid for great teaching .  Wishy washy!