This is an excerpt from my bookconscious blog -- check it out to see what else I read in June.
Also set in Paris, in the months before the Iraq War began, is the book I read for the Europa Challenge this month, Alexander Maksik's You Deserve Nothing. This was a much-hyped title when it came out last year, one of the first in Europa's Tonga imprint. It's about a popular teacher at an international high school in Paris who has an affair with a student. Maksik tells the story from the point of view of that student, Marie, another student, Gilad, and Will, the teacher.
Maksik is a cinematic writer -- a scene where Gilad and Colin, a tougher student, show up at an Iraq War protest and watch it turn ugly and sectarian is particularly vivid, as is a scene where a disturbed homeless man pushes a commuter in front of a train in the Metro. As I read, I could see the streets of Paris, Will's bleak apartment, the cafes and parks that Gilad frequents. The moody world Will and his adolescent students occupy comes to life in Maksik's skilled hands.
Will is known to his adoring students as "dude" and "Mr. S." He's an archetype of the cool-smart teacher who is passionate, pushing the envelope and disdaining administrative blather because he's all about setting his students' hearts and minds on fire. Students say he changes their lives.
Except, the reader is uncomfortable with him almost immediately. Maksik lets us know Will isn't quite as great as his students think. His best friend at the school, a woman named Mia who is also a good teacher but perhaps not as flamboyantly admired as Will, puts up with his distance, his silence, his inconsiderate behavior. There's an uncomfortable scene where they are having dinner at her apartment with French friends who mistakenly assume Mia and Will are a couple. Will comes across as emotionally frozen, or indifferent. It's hard to tell.
As the book proceeds, we learn bits and pieces about Will -- he left his wife, apparently with little explanation, after his parents died. He teaches Sartre, Faulkner, Keats, Thoreau, Shakespeare, Camus. He talks a good game to his students about courage, about "the distance between desire and action," encouraging them to "encounter" themselves, to engage with the world and each other, to argue their points in his class.
Meanwhile, Maksik portrays him as someone who is mostly just going through the motions, who does things to please himself, and who cares about other people only to a point. Will spends his life talking about how to live, but he mostly seems to live in his own little bubble; his interior monologue is quite focused on what he is seeing and experiencing, as if his mind is its own cinematographer, seeking the most beautiful way to capture the scenes he's seeing. When he considers others it seems to be only slightly.
I didn't like Will, and Maksik's portrayal of Paris is pretty grim, as a place hard for outsiders (and almost every character in this book is an outsider in some way) to fit into, beautiful but distant (kind of like Will). I admired Mia, and some of the students at the school; Gilad is everything Will can't seem to get around to being. His father beats his mother, he's never felt at home anywhere, but Gilad is transformed by what he's reading in Will's class and is able to speak to his parents openly, to be true to his beliefs and his feelings as he comes to understand himself and them. I felt bad for Marie, whose mother is obsessed with her daughter's appearance and who seems to just want to be loved, but she is one dimensional -- we hear only about her affair and her toxic mean-girl friendship with Ariel, another student, and her distant parents, but little else.
Even though the book is uncomfortable and the characters, especially Will, somewhat unsympathetic, I think in the end it's a "good" book because it forces readers to think about the questions it poses about morality, conviction, courage, charisma, friendship, love. How should we live? What is our responsibility to ourselves and to each other? What does it mean to take a stand? How do we know what's worth risking ourselves for) How can we tell what we can and can't change? How should we judge ourselves and others? What's heroism and not just hubris? It's a hard book to describe because I admired it without really enjoying it.
But it did cause me to find Albert Camus' The Stranger, which I hadn't read, and it's always good when one book leads you to another.
I'm still on track to read one Europa Editions a month in 2012.
