This exceedingly strange first novel arrives festooned with lavish quotations from reviews of the author’s previous book, a collection of short stories called “The Bostons” (2001), and the usual array of rhapsodic blurbs from fellow members of the literary set. It gives me no pleasure to say so, but all the excitement is quite beyond my understanding. Yes, the novel spouts all the usual left-of-center opinions fashionable among the literati, with a strong dash of feminism thrown in, but viewed strictly as a work of fiction it is almost wholly without redeeming qualities.
“Daughters of the Revolution” is set in and about a small New England preparatory school between 1963 and 2005. This, more than the pre-publication ballyhoo, is what drew me to it. Personal experience, much of it unpleasant, has left me with an exaggerated and perhaps unhealthy interest in the minuscule world of prep schools and the even more minuscule literature that has emerged from it. The most famous of these books is, of course, J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” with John Knowles’s “A Separate Peace” running a distant second, though the only novel of genuine and lasting literary distinction with a prep-school setting is Louis Auchincloss’s “The Rector of Justin.”
One distinguishing characteristic of these books is a deep skepticism about, if not outright hostility to, the values preached in these private, exclusive schools and what they teach their students about their responsibility toward others as well as themselves. Thus, for example, the fictional headmaster of the school Justin Martyr in Auchincloss’s novel confesses: “I see that Justin Martyr is like the other schools. Only I, of course, ever thought it was different. Only I failed to see that snobbishness and materialism were intrinsic in its make-up. Only I was naive enough to think I could play with that kind of fire and not get my hands burnt.” It is a rare admission, but then the rector of Justin, for all his faults, is a rare man.
The same cannot be said for Goddard Byrd, the headmaster in “Daughters of the Revolution.” Carolyn Cooke, who has a fetish for names that belabor the obvious, notes that he is “known to his friends and enemies as ‘God’ ” and is “a virile, uncircumcised male of his class, upbringing and era,” the era in question being the late 1960s. The institution over which he presides is called the Goode School — talk about belaboring the obvious — but needless to say it scarcely lives up to its name, being a redoubt of male privilege and what used to be called muscular Christianity. Byrd is an old-fashioned man who treasures “the souls of dead white men” but resents being “dismissed as a moth-eaten conservative, an antifemale chauvinist, a reactionary fogy.” He takes deep pride in his school:
“What did the school stand for, after all, but a certain kind of boy . . . whose character was forged on the playing field, whose soul was enlarged (but not falsely puffed up) by literature and language, whose mind was sharpened by mathematics and science, whose spirit was tuned by daily hours in chapel to the profound mysteries of life, whose manners at table were stiffened like lightly starched napkins by years of French service at the evening meal? Even if on the surface God’s boys resembled regular boys of the era, with their long hair and woozy airs, they were at heart conservative in the Goode School tradition — boys in possession of traditions worth conserving.”
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