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Executive Times |
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2007 Book Reviews |
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The
Headmaster Ritual by Taylor Antrim |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Force Taylor
Antrim’s debut novel, The
Headmaster Ritual, is set in a Massachusetts prep school. With a bow to
the expression, “Those who can’t do, teach,” the protagonist, Dyer Martin,
failed as a salesman, and ended up being hired as a teacher. The school’s
headmaster is a radical obsessed with North Korea and uses Martin to lead a
team of students at a model U.N. conference in which they play the part of
the North Koreans. Along the way, on multiple levels, power builds up and
blows, with boys being boys in hazing, romance and power plays. Here’s an
excerpt, pp. 16-21, featuring the headmaster’s son,
James, who attends the school: The
third floor of Weiss consisted of four double rooms, a group bathroom, and
one single. The hall was empty and quiet when James reached the landing at
the top of the stairs. The brass number plates on his door were missing— in
their place lay darker paint studded by nails. James crouched down and
sniffed the circular tan stain at the base of the door. Mildew, then an
acrid chemical scent, then, running underneath, the sweet rot of meat. James
knew the story from eavesdropping on lunchtime gossip last year. That spring
—before they all got busted for drinking and before Henry got kicked out —
the third-floor Weiss guys had engaged in two weeks of Property. It began
small, as Property always did: Henry Fieldspar threw a stack of James
stared at the stain on the carpet. By tomorrow night, he thought, the seniors
would be up here. Sam, Cary, Buddy Juliver, Brian Jones, the others. Each
one of them must have put their names into the Weiss room lottery for room
12. And the headmaster's kid had had it handed to him. All
last year, crossing campus, eating lunch in Commons, studying in the library
reading room, James had felt independent and anonymous. Hardly anyone paid
any attention to him; no one even seemed to know or care that he was the
headmaster's son. In class, he made a few friends, Jeffrey Cohen from
Chemistry, Volker Stein, the German exchange student, in U.S. History. He
hadn't been lonely. He'd
told his dad all of this, but Wolfe had made it clear that his decision was
final. "You can't go on isolating yourself from your peers," he'd
said. He'd made James pack or box up everything in his room, relenting only
on the framed picture of his mom that James had wanted to leave. "You
need to commit," Wolfe had said. "I don't want you to think you can
just come back if things get difficult." James
figured he was being taught a lesson. Like when he was fight and his dad
swore off gift-giving. "The spirit of Capitalism," he'd said of the
Christmas tree James and his mother had decorated. Or the time Wolfe had sat
James down, at age fourteen, for documentary on the But Weiss was the opposite of a commune. The
seniors took whatever they wanted out of the rooms of the lower-form guys on
the ground floor — CDs, DVDs, any food they could find. Lowers had to clean
rooms and answer the communal pay phone on the third floor, even though they
lived two flights down (the head-of-dorm apartment filled the second floor).
It would ring, and one of
the seniors would shout "Lower!" till someone started climbing the
stairs. More than six rings, and a lower would get tackled on his way to the
shower, have his head dunked in a toilet. Any new kid, no matter what year,
got hazed. James slumped against the hallway wall feeling a tense,
held-breath quality in the silence around him. He'd wanted a small room in an
uncool boys' dorm, a safe place to hide out till spring. This special
treatment was a disaster. He let himself into his new
room. Sunlight poured in from the big
window on the east wall. A single bed was tucked into the corner. The closet
door stood ajar. An extension cord snaked across the wood floor. Bright
rectangles of white marked the locations of old posters. A girl sat against the far
wall. Her name was Jane Hirsch. James
recognized her from Calculus and Chemistry. She sat cross-legged, her hands
cupping her ankles, a Polaroid camera resting in her lap like a pet. Her eyes
were closed. Photos lay scattered around her knees. James pushed his bag inside the
doorway with his foot, and Jane's eyes snapped open. She blinked at him for a
few indecisive seconds, then lifted the camera. The flash went off; the
camera whirred out film. "Hi," she said. James nervously eyed the
photos. Henry Fieldspar smiling. Henry frowning. The side of Henry's head.
James remembered — also from Commons gossip — that Jane and Henry had been a
couple in the spring. That they'd logged multiple afternoons in this very
room, on that bed in the corner. James and Jane stared at each
other. "Came in the window,"
Jane said, and pointed. James crossed to the sill and
leaned out. A fire escape, a vertical ladder bolted to the brick, lay six
inches to the left of the opening, the rungs corroded orange with rust. He
turned around. He still hadn't said anything. What could he say? "How
was your summer?" "Fine,"
she said. "I did four weeks of Mandarin at Yale. You?" "Waited
tables at Scudo's in "Cool,"
she said. He
shook his head. Jane stacked the photos in a pile and turned them facedown.
She didn't seem to be leaving. "You taking 250?" he asked. "Yeah,"
she said. "I
saw the guy teaching it," James said. "What'd
he look like?" "Young,
I guess." He
tried not to stare at her heavy black eyebrows, at the white skin of her
neck. She wore frayed jeans, flip-flops, and a Britton soccer T-shirt. She
played center forward, cocaptain of the team, James knew. He remembered
crusty scabs on her knees in Calc. He remembered once seeing her cross campus
after a game — her wet black hair pulled into a ponytail, her soccer shorts
rolled on her hips,
her shins flushed, mottled from the guards. "So
you're taking Henry's room," she said. "I don't
want it. It's been assigned to me." "Better
you than one of those assholes," she said, nodding in the direction of
the empty hall. "I'm
not sure the assholes will feel the same way." "They
won't do anything." James
just stared at her. Jane
stood and slid the photos in the back pocket of her jeans. The camera dangled
from her wrist. "Do you mind not telling anyone I was here?" "Why
are you?" She
made a quiet, relieved sound, as if pleased James had finally asked. "I
didn't think anyone would be moving in yet." Silence. "I miss
Henry. I know it's stupid or girly or whatever." "Have
you heard from him?" James finally asked. "I
saw him this summer when he came up to Yale. He's gone to this boys' school
outside of "Funny," said James,
keeping his voice dull and neutral. "He's trying to get back
in here to save his chances at "I didn't know him that
well," James said, his gaze leveled off her left shoulder. "I know," she said,
and pushed a few strands of hair behind her ear. "I guess I'll see you in
class:" "Class isn't until next week.
Come over to Bachelor tonight. Bunch of seniors who're here already are
getting together. Sign-in is lax since school hasn't technically begun." Was that a joke? She must know
he didn't go to parties. "I have to unpack," he said. Jane grinned at the single
duffel on the floor. "Want some help?" James nudged the door. It swung
on a whiny hinge. "Well," she said.
"You know where Bachelor is" She turned to go, and James's
eyes fell on the photos stuffed into the seat pocket of her jeans. He also
noticed the silver anklet that hung between her frayed cuff and callused
heel. A gift from Henry? She hadn't worn it last year. He would have seen it.
She passed down the stairs, out of sight. James closed the door and sat
down on the corner of the bed. Through the open window, he could see straight
across the road that separated East and West Quad, could see the shingled corner
of Bachelor beyond the roof of Commons and the leafy tops of birch trees. He kept swallowing, trying to
calm down. He
imagined Henry waiting for Jane with his window open, some night in April
before he got kicked out. He imagined Jane sprinting from her dorm, from
hedge to hedge, skirting the sides of buildings, following the shadows on the
ground. He imagined Henry listening for Jane on the ladder outside. There
were campus patrols, and cruising was a probationary offense. Still, Henry
had had the privacy of a single, they'd had this narrow bed to themselves,
and they'd been falling in love. James
lay flat on his back. Glow-in-the-dark
sticker stars spelled FUCK BRITTON on
the ceiling. Home
could be anywhere, James told himself. The less you cared about where you
lived, the better off you were. I’ll
be fine. What could they do to him? How bad could it
be? He thought of the photo, the one Jane had taken of him when he came in.
He took a deep breath, and a delicate floral scent reached him. Perfume — and
running underneath like a fetid stream, that meaty rot. He
thought of the calf, wondered if it had ever been born, if it ever had any
thoughts, even dumb bovine thoughts, before losing its brain to science. There’s
an intensity to the prep school years, and in a boarding setting, the
intensity becomes similar to a hothouse, which Antrim captures well on these
pages. The whole North Korea motif seems forced, but in many ways, the whole
novel is about force. On page 279, that’s well-summarized: “This was the
lesson learned this year, more important than any of his classwork: force
built up inside you, and you let it out.” The
Headmaster Ritual is a promising debut novel, just quirky enough to be
entertaining. Steve
Hopkins, September 25, 2007 |
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Go to Executive Times Archives |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the October 2007 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The Headmaster Ritual.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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