Boys to Men

After the good doctor is run out of town, his students, including Ben and his friends Oliver Comstock and Linnaeus Finch, are sent to the Otsego Lake Academy, which belongs in that infernal catalog of Hell's secondary schools, alongside Dickens's Salem House and Charlotte Brontë's Lowood. Mr. Rappaport, Otsego's sadistic Latin teacher, is a terrifying creation. A "sleekly poisonous sneerer," Rappaport viciously harasses Ben and his "artistic" friends -- Linnaeus, a talented painter, and Oliver, an unrepentant aesthete who proudly shares a birthday with Dorian Gray. Latin may be the public language of The Bearded Ones, "but Ben thought that another language was involved, another private code for use in girlie-free rooms with closed doors and a smoky atmosphere." Rappaport's job, as he sees it, is to exorcise the girlie-boys from the real men and keep them from breaching those closed doors.

Rushforth's storytelling is dense and discursive, circling back and forth between Ben's boyhood and his later experiences at Otsego. The effect can be confusing, especially when some scenes are revealed to be extended daydreams, and the author's eccentric style (heavy on parentheses) can cause narrative gridlock. But the novel brightens whenever the unflappable Oliver appears. It's a mark of Rushforth's brilliance that this foppish, rapier-witted teenager is the one who finally challenges the horrible Rappaport during an extended, page-turningly intense sequence that is the book's grand finale.

It is also, sadly, Rushforth's last stand. The third volume of his quintet, Touching the Wound, was outlined but not completed when he died, which makes the final lines of A Dead Language all the more haunting.

"What could he see?

"What could he see?

"What could he see?

"Emptiness."

Elizabeth Hand's third collection, "Saffron & Brimstone: Strange Stories," has just been published.