I saw The History Boys. I'd wanted to like it, but I didn't.

One reviewer praised the play for being chock full of one-liners. This is true, and it's a problem. All subtlety and slowness are sacrificed for the cheap laugh, and the shallowness of it is exhausting. Because the characters are vehicles for one-liners, they're not real people. The more developed a character was, the more he seemed a caricature. This was especially true of the headmaster, Irwin, Hector, and Posner. Posner is the kind of ostentatiously sensitive, utterly defenseless gay teenager, full of comically rueful appraisals of himself, whom you only come across on a Broadway stage. I don't think he would have lasted very long in that school, or any school. The other boys were wisecracking slouches, which was more believable, but they were even more one-dimensional than Posner. More one-dimensional but less caricatured, like objects seen from a distance, since Bennett doesn't expend much effort on them. (Part of the problem might be this: the boys want nothing more than to be funny, whereas Posner, caricature though he is, wants to be taken seriously, yet Bennett forces him to deliver jokes anyway.)

And you never saw the boys adjusting to one another, or even hesitating and not knowing what to say, as they would in real life; that would have entailed attenuating their exaggerated features and rationing the one-liners, and Bennett loves his caricatures.

There's a similar problem with the sentimental Broadway showtunes that the boys regularly sing (complete with dance routines). I couldn't think of them as schoolboys; instead I saw theater people wallowing in nostalgia and acting out their professional self-love.

I like showtunes, and I like teenagers. But I've never known a teenager who loved camp, let alone a whole classroom of teenagers. And this play didn't for a minute convince me that it could happen.

Another reviewer said that you get to know all the boys; they're all individuals. In fact you really only get to know four of them, and all of these are defined by their attitudes (varied but clichéd) toward sex. This is the only kind of individuality that Bennett is capable of breathing into them. It's strange and regrettable, considering how many scenes of lessons there are in the play, and the infinite ways in which personality can manifest itself in a classroom. But then none of these scenes lasts more than three minutes — long enough to deliver a barrage of one-liners, but not long enough for character development.

But all this is incidental to the biggest problem, which is the play's premise. It offers two versions of education: a messy, passionate affair, for its own sake and unto itself, represented by the Falstaffian Hector; and an exercise in glibness, purveyed by the sleek future TV host, Irwin. Hector is on his way out; he represents the beloved past of education; Irwin represents the future, and we're meant to hate what he represents (if not the man himself). He has been hired to get the boys into Oxford or Cambridge. They have the grades, thanks to another teacher, dry, solid but unimaginative; what they need now is polish and class, and the way to impress admissions interviewers, Irwin tells them, is boldly to take the most counterintuitive view of a historical event or development, secure in the knowledge that brazenness will win the day.

There are several problems with this:

— I know that admissions interviewers would say that they're not looking for flash or class, but for something, anything, beyond a plodding recitation of facts — analysis, passion, opinion supported by evidence. It's an unanswerable position, and one that the play doesn't — can't — consider.
— Passion and appreciation are essential, but they're not the alpha and omega of education, even in the humanities. There's also the painstaking business of getting to know the language from all angles, of using it effectively, of matching words to things, and of learning to read closely. There was none of this, because rhetoric in this play is Irwin, is spin, TV, polish, cynicism, shallowness, etc. On the other side of this false dichotomy we get the boys' reenactments of love scenes from classic films (shallowness?), and Hector's self-involved ruminations. Of course there's such a thing as neat rhetoric that masks an intellectual vacuum, but that's just a higher stage in the battle for clarity and eloquence. It's not a short-circuit, and good teachers and students are not powerless against demagogic rhetoric. In fact, that may be what annoyed me most: the suggestion that good teachers are by definition helpless mumblers, insightful by the fireside (so to speak), but unable to defend themselves against fast talkers from the hard and shiny real world.

The big irony is that for all Hector's (and presumably Bennett's) disdain for style, flash, and class, The History Boys is as guilty of glibness as Irwin.

Before class my seventh-graders were all abuzz about their new school:
R __ P already got rejected by two girls!
P __ What?!
me __ P, just don't respond.
P __ OK.

Hours later I saw the humor in this. What tickles me is that this exchange, brief as it is, reveals two conspicuous features of the boys' personalities — R's outrageousness, P's sweet equanimity.

I asked that class to write a list of things they wanted to study. Here are the three responses I got:

Patrick
My recommendations for this semester are:
— Latin
— Old English
— word origins

Viren
1. Latin advanced from chapter 4
2. anything except this packet
3. reading — a book that is not boring
4. Latin
5. Latin
6. if nothing else — Grammar

Richard
— Latin
— Greek
— Little History of the World [Gombrich's book]
— No packet
— Grammer [sic]

(The hated packets are vocabulary exercises. It's useful for them to focus on style, usage and syntax apart from questions of logic and paragraph and essay structure, but I can see how the packets might get tedious.)

So I took those three out of the classroom and we did some Latin. As I gave them the handouts I said,

__This is from a college textbook, and the vocabulary notes are quite detailed and technical —
Viren__Oh, come on! [="Give us some credit!"]
me__ — so you're not responsible for everything in the notes.

But he's right; I shouldn't talk like that.

Note: I took a college course in Latin last year, and we used a middle school textbook. It turned out to be OK, because the teacher was good, but when I saw all those cartoons my heart sank. (And I'm glad the course was a review for me; I'd have been irritated to first encounter those things in such a book.)

What people are saying:

S: Lauren Bacall & Shimon Peres are cousins. I looked it up. It's true.

Kaveri: She toured some mansions in Newport (top recommendation: Château sur la mer), and one of the audio tours, by an architectural historian, featured several plugs against the federal income tax: "Of course, none of this would have been possible after 1913… Just think what you could do if there were no federal income tax!" I thought of FDR, who raised the top income tax rate to 90% and was accused of being a class traitor. "I welcome their hatred," he said. Kaveri: "What a guy!"

Amber: 1) This is something she told me a few years ago. She was playing violin for a costume ball in a decaying palace in the middle of a wood in eastern Germany. The way she described it, it sounded like the wood was so lush, the roads so neglected, that it was hard to reach the front door: "like Sleeping Beauty without the rosebushes." The palace had once been grand, and the owners had hired an Italian to paint the ballroom's walls and ceiling, which are now very faded, but still beautiful. All comers have to be in costume, but some buy a plastic dress from a party supplies shop, and some spare no effort or expense. During World War II Soviet troops occupied the palace. They ripped up the parquet in the ballroom for firewood, so the floor is now just rough planks, and someone wrote, in huge Cyrillic letters over the faded wall paintings: S T A L I N.

2) She played in an opera in Cesky Krumlov, in the Czech Republic. In the 18th century trade routes forsook the town, and the theater was locked up, to be reopened only quite recently. Props and machinery were all still there, in a fragile state, but one could nevertheless figure out what they had been about. The performance she was in was meant to be historically accurate, down to the blocking, and she was surprised, she said, that the singers moved very little, and that what movements and gestures they did make were very stylized. "It was like being in a painting — a painting that's alive. And it didn't end at the edges of the stage; the sets were an extension of the painted walls and ceilings of the theater" — illusion upon illusion, the borders between each level elided. "I used to think rococo was all about lack of restraint, ornate excess, but now I realize that when it's done well it's very still and concentrated."

Yes — Couperin & Marvell.

This was originally meant as an amazon.com review — I was incensed to see that all reader reviews of this book were positive, someone had to warn the unwary browser! — but it was not accepted. At first I thought this was because I refer to other reviewers, so I took out those references. Then I realized I was above the 1000 word limit, so I trimmed and pruned until I got down to 999 words. Admittedly, one editing strategy was to jam words together. After all this it still was not published. Either my agglutinations didn't make it past some clever computer, or my review was deemed spiteful (one of many the prohibitions). I'm still too angry to keep it to myself, but maybe some day I'll regret my intemperance. Not yet.
(I know it's a mess, a rant more than a review; I wrote it in one go giving no thought to structure, and have not been able or willing to muster the loving delicacy necessary to edit properly.)

A monstrous unbearable stale perverse book

Faulkner's sentences are very long, but they're not constructed; rather, they're piled on. He throws mud, lumber, and nails into a heap and calls it a house. "But where's the door?" asks the poor reader. "There's no way in." His prose doesn't create a world; rather, he uses the same twenty words over and over again, clumsily and without, one suspects, really knowing what they mean: maybe wind can "chuckle" (though it's hard to imagine) but what does it mean to say that the wind is "risible"? Yet he says this again and again, for several pages. In another passage, lasting about ten pages, he uses the word "derision" in a similarly blunt and insensitive way. He injects these words into the reader, forcing a mood upon one that he cannot achieve by legitimate means.

You too can write like Faulkner if you pepper your writing with the following words:

immemorial
profound
violent
unbearable
monstrous
sober (a word that, one suspects, held depths of meaning for an alcoholic, but fails to impress the non-alcoholic)
furious
grim
stale
stagnant
perverse
derisive
frenzy
incredible (a word for lazy writers if there ever was one; "incredible" to whom?)
immolation
savage

And be sure to use unnecessary suffixes, as in "abstractional" and "outragement." (What's wrong with "abstract" and "outrage"? Nothing, except that Faulkner needs the suffixes to hide the fact that he has nothing to say.)

Elsewhere he writes: "The coffee was weak, oversweet and hot, too hot to drink or even hold in the hand, possessing seemingly a dynamic inherent inexhaustible quality of renewable heat impervious even to its own fierce radiation."

"impervious even to its own fierce radiation": just what does that mean? That the heat of the coffee cannot penetrate ("even") the hot coffee? Explain, please. And what's the result of lavishing all these big words on a cup of coffee? Locally, it makes even the words that make some sense meaningless, like "inexhaustible quality": we know it's not inexhaustible, but even that bit of hyperbole has to be topped by something completely meaningless. A cup of coffee simply collapses under the weight of so many words that do more to overwhelm the reader, as she tries to make sense of them, than to make anything vivid. And page after page of this fog, this contempt for meaning, this laughably portentous bombast simply numbs the reader. So that when someone is described as being "incredibly calm" I could only think, "Nothing in this book is incredible, because nothing is credible."

One character says, a propos of nothing, "Set, ye armourous son, in a sea of hemingwaves." I just couldn't believe it. Are we supposed to think, "How clever"? Are we supposed to laugh? But this is a book that has banished laughter, so one is left with the assumption that this neologism is meant to be clever and somehow profound.

Here's another excerpt:

"We got to get somewhere."
"Dont I know it? A fellow on a cottonhouse. Another in a tree. And now that thing in your lap."
"It wasn't due yet."

Those last two sentences make it seem as though the woman had given birth. This comes as a surprise, because we've been with her the whole time and nothing was said about her being in labor. But a few pages later it becomes clear that she hasn't given birth yet. Is this confusion deliberate? If so, what would the point be? Or is it merely careless?

The characters are either dull, blank, and impenetrable, or they're hysterical cardboard caricatures straight from pulp fiction; it's hard to say which is more boring.

One of the messages of the novel is that women with husbands are desirable, whereas women with children are not. Faulkner would probably call this a perverse paradox, a stagnant immolation. (Charlotte might seem to be an exception, but she is redeemed by her utter indifference to her children.) Wild Palms takes a tragic turn when Charlotte becomes pregnant and insists on having an abortion: "It's not us now. I want it to be us again, quick, quick." The convict has to leave a job he likes when he seduces, or rapes — we never know, and it's characteristic of the novel that it hardly seems to matter, either to the benumbed characters or to the reader, who has been brutalized by Faulkner for 200 pages — anyway, he gets into trouble with the wife of another worker. His fellow convicts are surprised that he never made any advances to the woman who has gone through thick and thin with him for several weeks and has made no attempt to rejoin the father of her baby, and the fact that she has a child is offered as an explanation.

I'm perplexed by the reviewer who says that this is a pro-life novel; I see no implied criticism of the lovers' justification that a child would be unaffordable (because they prefer not to work), and would put an end to their passion. To the end Charlotte and Harry are presented as anti-heroes bravely challenging bourgeois conformity.

Many of the reviewers assume, and Faulkner would have us believe, that the lovers are "doomed" from the start. Whatever this might mean, their only problem for the first 150 pages is that Harry refuses steady work, and forces Charlotte to quit her job, out of a fear of becoming bourgeois. He looks for a job, sporadically, and when he finds one, or even talks about finding one, Charlotte screams at him. It's hard to be patient with these people.

The last line of the novel is
"Women, shit," the tall convict says.

The whole novel is full of similarly unintelligent statements about women (aka "female meat"), generalizations about unreasoning instinct, etc etc. Here's one:

Not thrift, not husbandry, something far beyond that, who (the entire race of them) employed with infallible instinct, a completely uncerebrated rapport for the type and nature of male partner and situation, either the cold penuriousness of the fabled Vermont farmwife or the fantastic extravagance of the Broadway revue mistress as required, absolutely without regard for the instrinsic value of the medium which they saved or squandered and with little more regard or grief for the bauble which they bought or lacked, using the presence and absence of jewel or checking account as pawns in a chess game whose prize was not security at all but respectability within the milieu in which they lived, even the love-nest under the rose to follow a rule and a pattern…

I'll spare you the rest of that sentence. But it's typical of Faulkner that he has to coin a useless, ugly word — "uncerebrated" — to express a cliché.

"Up the corridor, beyond an elbow, he could hear the voices of two nurses, two nurses not two patients, two females but not necessarily two women even… two nurses laughing not two women…"

What kind of distinction is he drawing between "females" and "women"? We never meet these two nurses, but I imagine he means that they're unattractive. It's a characteristically random and clumsy bit of nastiness, and it seems to issue more from Faulkner than from Harry, who at the moment has other things to worry about.
On the next page two doctors come "…up the corridor and [talk] to one another in clipped voices through their mouth-pads, their smocks flicking neatly like the skirts of two women, passing him without a glance and he was sitting down against because the officer at his elbow said, 'That's right. Take it easy' and he found that he was sitting, the two doctors going on, pinch-waisted like two ladies, the skirts of the smocks snicking behind them…"
The hatefulness of the doctors seems to have everything to do with their effeminacy.

In the same scene doors "clash" "soundlessly." If you insist on cancelling the connotations of words, sooner or later all your words will lose connotations. For me this happened on page 2 of this awful novel.