The Rehearsal by Eleanor CattonReagan Arthur (Little, Brown), 2010 (Originally Granta, 2009)

This book, with its shifty chronology and its disorientation and its self-consciously literary style might seem over-the-top or pretentious or off-putting, especially at the start, when you don’t quite know what on earth you’re reading. But Catton’s writing, and the story, are engrossing enough that it worked for me. The book might be said to explain its own style, its own conception of literature as well as theater, early-ish in the book, in the following passage:

The Head of Improvisation said, “Acting is not about making a copy of something that already exists. The proscenium arch is not a window. The stage is not a little three-walled room where life goes on as normal. Theater is a concentrate of life as normal. Theater is a purified version of real life, an extraction, an essence of human behavior that is stranger and more tragic and more perfect than everything that is ordinary about me and you.” (34)

And, a few pages later, this passage elaborates on the idea—the “statue” in the below is the statue of a god in ancient Greece, which has been discussed previously in this section of the book:

The Head of Improvisation said, “The stage is not real life and the stage is not a copy of real life. Just like the statue, the stage is only a place where things are made present. Things that would not ordinarily happen are made to happen on stage. The stage is a site at which people can access things that would otherwise not be available to them. The stage is a place where we can witness things in such a way that it becomes unnecessary for us to feel or perform these things ourselves.” (36)

So, among other things: don’t expect the characters to talk and behave just like real people all the time: they’re not, and if they were you might not want to read about them. But I’m getting ahead of myself: let me back up. The Rehearsal is, in part, about an all-girls high school where a teacher has been caught in a relationship with one of his students. But it’s also about the drama school down the road, and the fact that they’ve turned the scandal into a play. And it’s about everyone’s reactions to the scandal: the grown-ups’ fear, the more curious and flip reactions of the other girls in the school, which shift toward judgment and meanness as time passes. One character describes teenagers as “boiling away with private fury and ardor and uncertainty and gloom” (4), and that mood of turmoil is well-captured here. All the anxiety around sex feels just right: I went to an all-girls high school, and while no one in my class (as far as I know!) had an affair with a teacher, there were crushes and rumors and jokes, and I’m sure if someone had been sleeping with a teacher there would have been scandal and fuss but also, among the students, at least some of the same kind of jealousy that Catton describes here: as one character puts it: “When the lights go out, the parents cry and ask each other what did he do to her, but the girls are burning with a question of their own: what did she do?” (42). A subplot about one girl maybe seducing another, possibly with encouragement from the mordantly funny saxophone teacher they both share (or possibly just in the saxophone teacher’s imagination, or possibly just in the girls’ imaginations), teases out the threat of female adolescent sexuality more: in the case of both the teacher-student relationship and the girl-girl relationship, desire appears as a force, as something powerful and dangerous, as something that creates or emphasizes a certain recklessness, something that separates the girls feeling it from the ordinary pack of girls around them.

The story is told in chapters with alternating focuses (a chapter focused on the school, Abbey Grange, will be followed by a chapter that focuses on the Drama Institute). Within each chapter, short sections headed with either a day of the week (for the Abbey Grange sections) or a month (for the Drama Institute sections) jump around chronologically, following, in large part, the stories of a student at the Institute named Stanley and a student at Abbey Grange named Isolde, who’s the younger sister of the girl who slept with the teacher. But it’s not just the chronology that’s unstable: it’s not always clear, especially in the Abbey Grange sections of the book, if you’re reading a description of events as they happened or events as they were imagined or events as they were interpreted and re-created by the students at the Drama Institute. But does it matter which is which? As one character says, “if a person is standing onstage in front of an auditorium full of people then ‘real’ is a useless word. ‘Real’ describes nothing on stage” (129). You might also say that ‘real’ describes nothing in a novel, but that doesn’t mean it has nothing to show us.