Book Review: Readings

The English Teacher

by Lily King

Atlantic Monthly Press, 256 pp., $23

This follow-up to the critically acclaimed The Pleasing Hour is a keen and forthright study of the inner workings of a family circle, which means it's excruciating to read – a strange compliment to bestow, but an apt one. Its protagonist, Vida Avery, is a repressed, recently married New England schoolmarm in the old-school mode; she prefers the structure and fateful predictability of Thomas Hardy to the messy chaos of actual life. Actual life has not been kind to Vida, whose now-teenaged son, Peter, is the product of rape; every morning she wakes up relieved that she hasn't killed Peter in her sleep.

While Vida finds shelter in bourbon and Victorian novels, Peter seeks refuge in his new stepfamily: a kind but oblivious widower and his three children, whose domestic rituals – watching television and eating proper boring boiled dinners around a kitchen table – offer illusory hopes of being a regular kid at last. But the year is 1979, so the television is showing the Iranian hostage ordeal, and Peter's older stepbrother is a budding Taoist and dropout whose countercultural leanings clash with Vida's staunch traditionalism. Inevitably, the family's gears jam, and long-suppressed feelings of anger and grief are unleashed.

King writes convincingly from a shifting third-person omniscient perspective, crafting a panoramic view of the book's events and evoking the reader's sympathies. There are no villains, and King makes clear how each of the children and adults contributes to the group's at times poisonous dynamic. Her chapters from Peter's point of view are particularly authentic in their depiction of an awkward adolescence at the bottom of the private-school pecking order. King slips between characters so effortlessly that even the misanthropic tang of Vida's cogitations – her distaste for technology, her intolerance of her colleagues' personal flaws, her barbed observations about the man who adores her so stupidly – dissolves when King downshifts into the voice of her son, who needs his mother desperately but is at times horrified by her. The resolution of the conflicts is a bit hurried and pat, taking place between several flash-forwards at the book's conclusion. Or perhaps it's that King so carefully constructs the family's worlds of pain that Vida's pessimism becomes infectious and we simply can't imagine her without it.