Times Staffers Recommend \'School Books\'

August 24, 2012, 12:18 pm

By JOHN WILLIAMS

To celebrate (or bemoan?) the impending academic year, I asked Times staffers to recommend books that are set in or around schools. Their answers coincide with the New York Times Book Review's special Back to School issue, which features books about education for adults, young adults and children. On Twitter, I'll be asking readers for their own suggestions, a selection of which will be shared on this blog in the coming days.

Sam Tanenhaus, Book Review Editor

“The Centaur” is the most autobiographical and, today, the most overlooked of John Updike's masterpieces, though it won the National Book Award in 1964. A memory tale, it evokes with wondrous immediacy the author's boyhood in Shillington, P enn., when he was a gifted, ungainly teenager, teeming with hope, passion and ambition - and a pupil in the same rural school where his father was a long-suffering but invincibly good-humored teacher. The classical over-story, conceived under the influence of Joyce, and painstakingly explained in the “Mythological Index” (shades of Nabokov's “Pale Fire”), is at times pursued too insistently. But the art rings truest in Updike's rendering of filial tenderness and in his vivid, almost shockingly tactile recreation of the cramped world father and son awkwardly share - the classrooms, hallways, the bandbox gym.

Janet Maslin, Book Critic

“The War Between the Tates” is Alison Lurie's funniest and most sharp-clawed novel. Published in 1974, and describing the step-by-step breakdown of a marriage between two academics, it is set at a place that's called Corinth University but is instantly recognizable as Cornell. This book's sat irical bite is so sharp that when the Cornell Chronicle ran a piece about Lurie in 1998, the English department chair half-joked that “we professorial types worry that we might be satirized in a sequel” and expressed “gratitude” that her subsequent books had had other targets. Lurie concentrates on hostilities between Brian Tate, a self-satisfied political science professor, and Erica, his maddeningly stifled wife. At 40, Erica has a Radcliffe degree that has earned her the right to sit through faculty dinners and a husband who expects to be doted on. There are also two Tate teens, described tartly by Ms. Lurie as “nasty, brutish and tall.” The year is 1969. The Tates have hit the age of midlife crisis. It is almost inevitable for Brian to get involved with a student and for Erica to be galvanized by feminism as she fights back. Even with Vietnam War is its backdrop, artfully contrasted with the Tates' form of combat, Lurie does her best strategic maneuvering on the home front. But it's the depiction of all things Corinth that makes this tale of fraught academia so timeless and dead-on.

Dwight Garner, Book Critic

I'd never heard of Karl Shapiro's “The Bourgeois Poet” (1964) - part memoir in verse, part existential rant, part squeamish academic satire - until Jim Harrison proposed an offbeat essay about it to me a few years ago, when I worked as an editor at the New York Times Book Review. Now I've pawed through it two or three times, always finding new lines to admire, fresh in their strangled agony. (“New York, killer of poets, do you remember the day you passed me through your lower intestine?”) Mr. Shapiro was a professor of English at the University of Nebraska when he wrote “The Bourgeois Poet” - he sometimes refers to himself as “B.P.” or just “Beep” - and his book is partly about being, as many students and teachers find themselves, in the middle of nowhere. “I drink my share and yours an d never have enough,” he declares. “I write my own ticket to oblivion.”

Pamela Paul, Book Review Features Editor

I adore tales of misery at British public schools, and George Orwell's essay “Such, Such Were the Joys” is the gold standard. Orwell's descriptions of life at St. Cyprian's made anything I endured at my suburban grade school seem like crying over a crushed Twinkie. My soggy tuna fish sandwich was manna compared with his porridge, which contained “more lumps, hairs and unexplained black things than one would have thought possible, unless someone were putting them there on purpose.” I love the way he mixes humor and pathos and principled outrage. His description of the cold Darwinian order of things and the bleak immorality of it all - brilliant. And the terrible poignancy of that opening line: That no sooner had he settled into his new school, at the age of eight, he began wetting his bed, a “disgusting crime which the child committed on purpose.”

Jennifer Szalai, Book Review Preview Editor

“Project X” by Jim Shepard is not to be confused with the antic party movie that goes by the same name. The novel takes a terrible subject - school violence - of which almost every grownup has an opinion, and Mr. Shepard writes about it from the perspective of one of the kids. In his short stories, Mr. Shepard has imagined the lives of everyone from a Victorian explorer mapping out Australia's desert to a gay engineer on the Hindenburg, and he writes about the inner life of an American boy with the kind of responsiveness and recognition that the adults in “Project X,” no matter how well-meaning, altogether lack. The book, like the boys at the center of it all, is funny and sad by turns.

Parul Sehgal, Book Review Preview Editor

My memories of my schooldays have been corrupted by my sentimentality. It's a tendency I can't quit or explain, but I'd like to blame Evelyn Waugh's “Brideshead Revisited.” I first read it as a new student at my New England prep school and identified so thoroughly with Charles Ryder, this dark, watchful interloper among the blondes, that I'm not sure if I reread it for solace or as blueprint. I was young the way Charles was young, suddenly surrounded by serious wealth, learning a new vocabulary (coxswain? Living trust?), trying to pass. My classmates might not have carried teddy bears around with them like Sebastian Marchmain, but they cultivated impressive eccentricities of their own. And like poor Charles, I lost my head entirely. It was my first experience of romance in the way Waugh conjures it: submission to the glamor of a time and place. I was nostalgic for it as it happened.

Julie Bloom, Culture Desk Editor

When I was in about third grade, maybe fourth, I became obsessed with a book called “Totto-Chan (The Little Girl at the Window).” It's about a rebellious Japanese girl who is expelled from school an d sent to an artsy alternative in Tokyo during World War II. Apparently it is really about the value of unconventional education in strict Japanese society and was written by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, a Japanese TV personality and UNICEF Goodwill ambassador. The title translates to an expression in Japanese used to describe people who have failed. I had no notion of anything of this. I just knew I loved the book - the girlish small details and the fact that classes took place in old railroad cars. I read it several times. “Totto-Chan” also sparked a dive into other books about girls who do bad things/get sent away-“Jane Eyre, ” “A Little Princess,” the LM. Mongtomerys, etc. - a perennially favorite theme.