Customer Reviews

The English Teacher

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Lily King's second novel is called THE ENGLISH TEACHER, and that's what her main character, Vida Avery, is. And that's about all Vida is; it's her whole identity, what she's built her life on. Fifteen years ago, Vida came to Fayer, an island off the coast of Maine, pregnant and with a terrible secret trailing her all the way from Texas. She got a job as an English teacher at the island's prestigious private school, and she gave birth to a son, Peter. For fifteen years, mother and son live in isolation (isolated from each other, and isolated from the rest of the world), until one day, a man named Tom Belou, a widower with three children, enters their lives. He asks Vida to marry him--and although she wants to refuse, she says yes. Peter, for his part, couldn't be happier about the marriage. For years, he's been trying to understand his mother, to forge some kind of relationship with her, to be a family with her--and he believes that, with the addition of a father figure and three new siblings, he and his mother will finally become a real family.

But Peter hadn't counted on the lingering presence of the former Mrs. Belou in their new home; her picture still graces the bathroom wall, her clothes are still in the basement, she lives on the lips of her three children. Still feeling isolated, Peter slips into daydreams of Mrs. Belou--of what it would have been like to have her for a mother, instead of his withdrawn, unstable one.

During the first month of her marriage, Vida begins teaching TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES to her sophomore English classes. She's taught the book for fifteen years, but suddenly she's seeing the parallels to her own life clearly. Vida, paralyzingly scared of living life, collapsing from within, retreats farther into a comforting bottle of bourbon; but rather than seeming farther away, her past seems to haunt her even more--and now Peter's demanding to know the devastating truth about his father.

THE ENGLISH TEACHER is startling in its simplicity, yet astonishing in its depth. It's an intense character study and a study of the complicated relationship between a mother and her son; it's Peter's coming-of-age story; it's the story of Vida's renewal. Both of King's protagonists are brilliant creations, and she keeps her focus tightly on them throughout the novel. Peter is an endearing teenage boy, confused and sexualized and curious, trying desperately to fit in with his stepsiblings and his peers. Vida is angry, detached, and desperate, a woman who's more attuned with the characters she reads about than her own life. Like the Iranians who are taken hostage on Vida's wedding day in 1979, Vida is a hostage, trapped in her own life. Vida has her alcohol, and Peter has his dreams of Mrs. Belou; but the one thing they can't escape from is each other.

King prose is understated but powerful, intimate, almost sensual. Her parallelism is brilliant. THE ENGLISH TEACHER is a novel rife with allusions to other novels and just the right amount of metaphoric language. While I would have liked to see more focus on the relationship between Vida and Tom, I thought King's portrayal of a blended family was spot-on. Her characters are perfectly nuanced; her prose is beautiful. THE ENGLISH TEACHER is definitely a novel to be reckoned with in the contemporary women's fiction genre, and I'd definitely recommend it. Lily King has captivated another reader, who will wait with excitement for her next offering.

The English Teacher by Lily King presents us with a simply written novel of deeply moving significance. The protagonist, Vida, is a high school english teacher more in tuned to the characters from the novels she teachers than to her students or family.

As the novel opens, Vida has just married Tom. It is clear that this is not a marriage built on high romance, at least not where Vida is concerned. She has considerable trouble adjusting to this new life she has created for herself. Vida is not the only person having trouble adjusting, either. Tom has his own children and Vida has a son, Peter. They all struggle to accept this brand new family. However, this is not the Brady Bunch retold in the form of a novel. Each character here has her or his own issues to work through by the last page.

Vida clearly is burdened; she possesses a powerful secret. Her ambivilence to everyone around her is deeply disturbing to family and friends. As they struggle to find the "real" Vida beneath the alcohol haze she has submerged herself into, she comes to terms with who she is.

There is another character who, although deceased, plays an important role in the book. Mary, Tom's first and late wife, is omnipresent in the lives of the characters, even for Vida and Peter, who never met her. Mary's picture hangs in Tom's house (in the bathroom, of all places)and her presence is felt by all.

All of this makes for a novel filled with allusions to Victorian novels and discussions of innermost feelings. It is a book to be read and re-read. Do not miss this book!

Lily King is not a sentimental writer. Nor is she a particularly modern one. Her style is rooted in the love and power of language. Her gifts for dialogue and visual and interior description are powerful.

This is a beautifully written book about grief and pain and yearning. It is also about the challenges of families that loss puts together, and how they develop strands of love and respect.

This book really moved me. Lily King has created, in Vida and her teenage son Peter, two of the most memorable and compelling characters of all time. She writes with grace and truthfulness about the awkward intimacy created when two families combine. When Vida, a fierce introvert with a dark secret, marries Tom, a well-intentioned widower with three children, she is forced to choose between living inside the intellectual fortress she's built as a prep-school English teacher and the complicated emotional business of being connected to others--especially her long-neglected son. The story is surprising, elegantly rendered, and propelled by Vida's unwilling and unforgettable catapult toward redemption. A beautiful novel.

Here's another winner from Lily King, author of The Pleasing Hour. Her second book doesnt disappoint. At first I thought it would be about the difficulties of merging two families in second marriages--which to an extent, it is. Vida marries Tom, but she seems terribly uncertain about it, while he couldn't be more sure he's done the right thing. Vida teaches English at a private school, and her seniors are learning Thomas Hardy, specifically Tess of the d'Urbervilles. All of Hardy's books are dark, but Tess is the one that will really send one reaching for the antidepressants. The students get angry when Vida seems to take an unsympathetic attitude toward Tess. As the story goes on, Vida's life is revealed as paralleling that of Tess in many ways. Vida can't deal with what really happened, and is happening to her, and this causes tremendous problems for her teenage son Peter, who is demanding to know who his father is. At the end, everything comes to a head, but unlike Thomas Hardy's books, the story ends on a hopeful note. The only criticism I have is that the book could have been longer and gone into more depth about some of the other characters.

Some people spend a lot of emotional energy without ever acknowledging the nightmares that leak gradually to the surface of rigidly controlled lives. Vida has built such a life for herself and her son, Peter, in Fayer, an island off the coast of New England. An English teacher, Vida has immersed herself in the classics, teaching her students the lessons of great literature. When Tom Belou, a widower with three children, asks Vida to marry him, she says yes, catapulting herself into a situation that will unravel all her self-possession and rigid denial of the past.

Watching the Iranian hostage situation play out on television, Vida is a hostage to her fear, a reaction to a denied past and her marriage to a widower with three children. Without much forethought, Vida is the mother of four. Mother and son have lived together for fifteen years on Fayer Island, her days carefully constructed to contain their small world. After the marriage, Peter and Vida move into the family home in Norsett, a more depressed town on the mainland, littered with abandoned processing plants. Tom's children keep referring to Vida as "your mother... as if they were trying to give her back". Her first day back at work, Vida is teaching her tenth graders Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Ubervilles, a novel that has special significance in Vida's world view.

Peter wants desperately to be a part of his new family, but an awkward age he has his own problems, virtually friendless and unable to forge a comfortable identity. Fueled by his mother's distance and his own sense of displacement, Peter, who has never known anything about his father, comes loose from his very tentative moorings. Between them, mother and son make an abrupt entrance into a house still grieving for a mother who died two years ago. As a new husband, Tom is patient to a fault, which only causes Vida's insecurities to become more unmanageable. Just when this woman's thoughtlessness verges on irritating, we are reminded what terrible secret Vida has carried throughout Peter's childhood and adolescence. Mother and son are drawn together unexpectedly, as if forged together but pulling apart. Before their lives can be recovered, Vida must confront a past that is destroying her future.

King uses her protagonists' isolation (both Vida and Peter's) to parallel the lessons Vida is teaching, but the safe literary walls crumble, leaving mother and son exposed. What begins with a vaguely irritating English teacher temporizing over her decisions ends with an emotional expose of a mother's ungovernable fears and the courage to speak her truth. Luan Gaines/ 2005.

Reading The English Teacher was one of the highlights of my summer. Lily King writes beautifully and with amazing insight into the psychology of her characters,in particular,Vida,who must face the truth of her past because her avoidance and denial no longer work. Vida, a single mother with a teenage son, marries a recent widower with three children. I was intrigued by the relationships, reactions and emotions of these characters and felt connected to them throughout the novel. The backdrop of the Iranian Hostage Crisis was a powerful metaphor, and the references to Tess of the D'Urbervilles make me want to reread that book next.

Vida Avery was used to being on her own. Fifteen years earlier, she had left her life and family back in Texas and fled to a remote island off the coast of Maine and began teaching at a private school. She believed this to be the best environment for her young son, Peter. But sensing that Peter perhaps needed more than she alone could give, she agrees to marry Tom Belou, a widowed clothing manufacturer. By leaving behind their life on the campus of the prep school and moving into Tom's home with his three children, Vida at last feels that Peter has the family he deserves.

But what about Vida? Does she even love Tom? She begins to question that herself. As she starts teaching TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES to her students, she finds eerie comparisons between Thomas Hardy's doomed heroine and herself. Was Vida, like Tess, fated to live on a "blighted star?" All the while, the bond between mother and son is tested as Peter tries his best to adapt to his life at school and the new one at home with his three new stepsiblings and stepfather.

Along with the Hardy comparison, author Lily King uses the setting (Maine in 1980 against the backdrop of the Iran Hostage Crisis) to parallel her lead characters' heightened sense of stifling restraint. The reader is not entirely sure of Vida's motives at any given moment or how her decisions will fare her, which urges one to read on to see where she will end up.

THE ENGLISH TEACHER begs the discussion: Are people in control of their own destinies, or are they --- as Hardy believed --- helpless victims of fate?

--- Reviewed by Bronwyn Miller

Set against the backdrop of the Iranian hostage crisis, The English Teacher tells the story of Vida Avery, a secluded, insecure literature teacher who previously "wore old moccasins and drank too much at parties," suddenly has second thoughts when she rushes into a marriage.

Vida has spent most of her life insulated from the troubles of the real world, losing herself in the world of classic literature. Vida, readily admits that she is hopeless when it comes to historical facts - the events never adhering properly in her brain, and she has never understood why moments on novels were unforgettable, while the details in real life just seemed to slip away from her.

Peter, her 15-year-old son, worries about Vida's often-perilous state of mind, but looks forward to moving into the house of her new husband, widower Tom Belou. Tom has three children and through Peter, we see the tentative hopefulness of an only child who is about to get the siblings he has always yearned for.

The marriage of his mother to Tom was exactly what Peter wanted and now it was here all around him, "written on balloons tied to chairs and on the inside of the gold band his mother now wore." Tom is an affable kind of guy who initially sweeps Vida off her feet, but from Vida, we soon earn that all is not well: She has married the sweet-hearted Tom but does not know how to love him.

Vida believed that by attaching herself to Tom she would be protected from the uneasiness of life, and also perhaps from her own demons. But now in his house, perched on a hard chair in his kitchen, "she feels like she was back in her parents' house with all its claustrophobia, all the old inexplicable resentments pressing down on them."

She begins to have problems relating to Tom's children, and the routine of domestic life quickly becomes too much for her. With their love making fraught with tension, Vida begins to think that this how marriage was, "bewilderment giving way to reassurance giving way to more bewilderment," and where relationships can only briefly "rekindle the initial fatal illusion."

As Vida becomes unstable, Peter begins to wonder who his father was and begins to resent his mother for continually shrouding the man in mystery. He feels late at night the pull of his father, "the mystery of him that was as large as the mystery of death itself and all tangled up with it. "

He also begins to have second thoughts about his new family and is haunted by the ghost of Mrs. Belou who had died in the house. He didn't want to live here on the house of a ghost and he begins to realize that he was so stupid to think the Belous would become a family, "that you could press people together and they'd stick."

Author, Lily King writes intuitively, and from the heart, rendering Vida's seething resentment and Peter's teenage-angst with an unadulterated vitality. As the narrative alternatives between Vida and Peter's point of view, King anchors this subtle take on relationships with the story of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'urbervilles, the book that Vida is currently teaching. This tragic tale of an unwed mother, who loses out on love, begins to have an unexpected and heartbreaking resonance for Vida.

Vida's eventual breakdown starts as a small pinprick in her chest, a familiar sting of fear that spreads, "it's great wings opening all at once." Up until now, Vida has been like a building to Peter, tall, brick, permanently adjacent and absolutely necessary, whose shape he has never questioned. "Now all he can see is the dilapidated frame, the broken windows the rotting roof."

The English Teacher is all about memories and the effect that they can have on relationships. The only way for Vida to really achieve peace is to tell Peter the truth about her past, even if she has to relive awful and unlivable memories. At heart of the story is its lovely depiction of wounded people struggling to find solace and stability in each other, and where the fragments of one's past can only yearn to be whole once more. Mike Leonard September 05.

This novel takes the hand of the reader and doesn't let go until the very end. Extremely honest, poignant and valuable. Lily King knows her stuff and she isn't afraid to take the time to develop her characters, present them with obstacles and give them space to help them figure out the solution, even if it means abandoning family, a career and driving clear across the country to find it. The novel also addresses trauma and alcoholism honestly and provides solutions and not just lives falling completely apart and not getting put back together again. I found a lot of hope in this book.