Customer Reviews

Hummingbirds: A Novel

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Hummingbirds reads like a modern American version of a Dickens novel, with its omniscient narration encompassing a broad cast of characters from different walks of life (i.e. teachers and students). And like the best literature, Gaylord's novel immerses the reader in another world--in this case, the world of the upper-crust Manhattan prep school. The Carmine-Casey School for Girls is so richly described, it feels more like a central character than a mere setting. Gaylord obviously possesses an intimate knowledge of the world of which he writes, but even more impressively, he exhibits a firm grasp of human nature. Hummingbirds is at once poignant and slyly humorous (a scene late in the novel involving spray-painted graffiti is ourageously funny). This is an amazing work of literary fiction, one that I cannot recommend highly enough--to teachers, high school/college students, and anyone interested in delving into the mystery and wonder of male-female relationship. But hey, don't take my word for it. Click on the "Look Inside" button above, and read Gaylord's opening chapter for yourself. I defy you not to get hooked by the novel's seductive prose.

This debut novel takes place in the backdrop of an elite girls' day school in Manhattan, the Carmine-Casey School for Girls. Here we find a heated and flurrying mixture of adolescent girls, the men and women who teach them, and the occasional visitors from the local boys school.

As in every school, there are stars. The star students here are Dixie Doyle, the lollipop sucking, pigtail wearing popular student with her cadre of followers. There is also Liz Warren, the studious, non-smiling student who always gets 'A's', and is a playwright. There are two male teachers who the young women adore, Mr. Binhammer and Ted Huges (with the unfortunate name of a dead poet). Binhammer has been in the school much longer than Mr. Hughes and they have a competitive relationship for popularity and adoration. As Binhammer says, "Carmine-Casey, of course, is the right place for him. Women to the left of him, women to the right of him. Like Alfred Lord Tennyson in a sorority house. That is, until the new teacher came along".

Binhammer is married and we find out early in the book that Sara, his wife, has been unfaithful to him at a conference. Incredibly, the young man she has her short-lived affair with is none other than Ted Hughes, the new teacher at Carmine-Casey. Binhammer attended this conference with his wife and shortly after they returned home Sara confessed her infidelity. He recognizes Ted Hughes when he first makes his entrance into Carmine-Casey. However, he chooses to keep his connection with Hughes a secret from Sara. How long can he do this without Sara finding out as their are a lot of events at Carmine-Casey that take place in the evenings where wives are expected to attend?

This is a story of women and the men who love and seek to understand them, who watch them flutter and dream, and really, truly LIKE women. "He likes women. He's not just attracted to them - - he likes them." It is also a story of girls becoming women and their travails and kudos as they seek to be admired and taken seriously. This is also a story about the women who teach at Carmine-Casey and their attempts to compete with their male counterparts as they attempt to be noticed and attended to by them. The mingling of the female teachers and male teachers often goes well beyond the confines of Carmine-Casey.

Friendship is another important theme of this book. The students and teachers wrangle to be noticed and listened to by those that are important in their lives. Dixie wants Liz to take her seriously, she wants Binhammer to listen to her. Liz wants to be noticed by Hughes. Binhammer wants to be admired by Ted Hughes. "Ted Hughes, the center of so much feminine attention. Binhammer realizes, embarrassed, that what he wants most is to beat those women and girls at their own game, to be dynamic enough to hold the gaze of Ted Hughes. To be the center of attention of the center of attention. That would be something." Friendships are vied for by students and faculty and they are evolving and changing as the seasons. Nothing at Carmine-Casey is static except the architecture.

The issue of gender is looked at with true puzzlement, as though it is something that is always just beyond our ability to understand. The girls love boys and men. The men love girls and women. However, loving and understanding are two different things. It is easy to love. Understanding, however, is a river that will flow forever, ephemeral and obtuse.

The girls want to be women, the women want to be girlish, the boys want to be men, and the men want to be boys. Carmine-Casey is a sea of wanting to be something else other than what you are. As one girl says, "You think you're going to get a look at something new. You think that the adult world is going to be like Oz - - once you're through the door everything is suddenly going to be in color. You find someone to take you there, and it's like going to a different country. But when you land on the other side you realize you haven't gone anywhere at all. You're back where you started. There aren't any new colors".

The book is a languishing and lovely read about the people who spend their days in the hallowed halls of Carmine-Casey, and sometimes their evenings as well. It is also about what they do when they leave these hallowed halls. It is about friendship, gender, age, love, sex and wanting - - wanting to be something different, something that is colorful and special, that all will notice and admire. They want to be "the voice that rings out clearer through the halls than any bell at Carmine-Casey".

What is most striking to me about Hummingbirds is how irrepressibly witty it is. Reading it was a continual pleasure as the author's narrator alternates between the tumultuous thoughts and desires of girls finishing their senior year of private high school and the more world-experienced minds of their male and female teachers. All of the characters sing off the page. I have a special fondness for the teacher named Sybil because she always seems to have a handle on things, even when others barely notice what she says. The author clearly loves all of his characters, and he never uses his formidable wit at the expense of them.

I cannot stress enough how well-written the novel is. If you already enjoy the writing of Tom Perrotta (Election) or the young Philip Roth, you will most certainly enjoy this novel. Anyone who likes smart writing would be remiss not to read it.

The characters in Hummingbirds are as wonderful and reprehensible as real people. By the end of the novel I had many reasons to love and a few reasons to hate every major character, from the seemingly shallow Dixie, who is constantly observing the world around her and trying to make it more interesting, to the reckless and beautiful Ted Hughes, a man whose mistakes are almost as endearing as his poetic sensibilities.

The social environment of the school in which the characters interact takes on a complexity rarely seen in literature, and it is wonderful. Too many authors demean and belittle the experiences of high school, those formative years where small things feel big and big things feel enormous. Joshua Gaylord, however, portrays the school and the girls inhabiting it with the perfect balance of straight-faced seriousness and affectionate laughter, exactly what you would expect from a teacher who loves working at a school for all the right reasons.

Reading Hummingbirds was a wonderful experience, one of the best I've had in the last several years. I highly recommend this beautiful, powerful novel.

The title HUMMINGBIRDS ostensibly describes the girls at the center of this charming novel, the students of Carmine-Casey, an elite NYC prep school, but the metaphor could apply to nearly every character: they flutter and hover around each other, unsure of themselves, unsure of others, and this insecurity and uncertainty is exploited well by the omniscient narrator who hops from head to head, contrasting one character's thoughts against another's.

Author Joshua Gaylord handles the omni viewpoint masterfully, showing just how little difference there is between the girls and the adults in their lives. The tone is fondly ironic, and the students--particularly the popular yet vapid Dixie Doyle and her antipodean counterpart, nerdy social outcast Liz Warren--are hilarious and engaging even at their most banal. Gaylord is a prep school teacher, and draws on his experience to fashion a striking verisimilitude: he nails the teen dialogue, the by turns inane and stunning insights of the girls, the juvenile popularity contests between the teachers, the overarching sense that you never really grow up, just get older.

While the girls are exquisitely drawn, and teacher Leo Binhammer is a sympathetic if simpering character, I found mystery man Ted Hughes (yes, like the poet) inscrutable. Ted is the new teacher at Carmine-Casey who disrupts Leo's established alpha maleness. Ted is to Leo what Dixie is to Liz: the inexplicably popular, alluring rival who thwarts the neurotic introvert at every turn. The parallel relationships between Ted/Leo and Dixie/Liz grow in surprising ways, and break free of cliché to realize each character as fully three-dimensional, both flawed and admirable. Ted's motives, however, are never clear, perhaps as a result of us never getting to head-hop into his viewpoint, so his actions--particularly the climactic scene toward the end--come off a bit arbitrary, perhaps even as a plot device to generate conflict and give the others something to react to.

Ted's opaqueness aside, the cast of characters--even incidental ones like Ted's date to the dance--are sympathetically rendered, their flaws and foibles endearing. Gaylord keeps the tone light and ironic, with an undercurrent of pathos. The novel has a distinct neo-Dickensian quality, though not as tightly plotted--HUMMINGBIRDS is more of a portrait gallery that you drift through, admiring the charming, sometimes hilarious, sometimes moving interplay of flawed personalities.

Joshua Gaylord has another novel out, The Reapers Are the Angels: A Novel, under the pseudonym Alden Bell. REAPERS is a deft character study in the grand tradition of literary classicists from the American South--and, it has zombies. Definitely worth a look.

Leo Binhammer is an English instructor at Carmine-Casey Academy, a private high school for girls. Adored and admired, Leo finds great contentment and solace in his profession as the only male teacher in the English department, doting girls following his every move. But Leo's world is disrupted when, one day, a charismatic new teacher named Ted Hughes arrives. This teacher is also a young and attractive man, and although he is friendly and amiable, Leo begins to feel displaced from his high perch at the school when the girls begin to notice and appreciate the attractive newcomer. As Leo learns to adjust to his new circumstances, life continues on at school and complexities and rivalries crop up in not only the students' lives, but in the teachers' as well. Leo and Ted become unlikely friends and Leo begins to unwittingly uncover all the many secrets and intrigues that Ted has kept hidden. Wryly amusing and stylistically deft, Hummingbirds is a cautionary and provocative tale about the overly fragile egos of two very educated men.

I really enjoyed this book, and for the most part, I would have to say that it was extremely well crafted. I was impressed with the author's writing style. It was very fluid and engaging, and in addition, most of the writing was very witty and humorous. The author seemed really adept at creating humorous situations and dialogue that really made the story sparkle and sizzle. Other sections of the book were written a bit like prose: great imagery and succinct word choices that made an impact without being overbearing. The writing struck the perfect balance for me by being neither too sparse nor too wordy, and instead I felt that the author was able to capture the emotions and conundrums of his characters perfectly. The narrative was told through several points of view, but these shifts were handled very solidly and without a lot of confusion, making the multiple narrator strategy very successful.

The story actually had three subplots: two involving the teachers, and one involving the students. It was very amusing to see that the teachers and staff had more drama and intrigue going on than the students did and that they handled their dramas with much more immaturity and snark than a group of teenage girls ever could. Though the story that focused on the students was interesting and involving, I thought that the grist behind the teachers' escapades was much more satisfying to me personally. I think on the whole, the story was integrated very well, with neither side dominating the limelight excessively.

I also thought that all of the characterizations were done very well and were remarkably detailed, though my favorite was the exasperated Binhammer, who sometimes could be a bit churlish when it came to his waning popularity. The author really had the knack for crating well rounded three dimensional characters, and I thought that he was quite brilliant in his creations of the schoolgirls. He managed to capture all the innocence and seductiveness that was teetering on the edge of their femininity remarkably well, and it was not hard at all to take them seriously as both girls and women due to their expert creation.

The only part of the book that I took exception to was the ending. Up until the last section of the book, I was happily reading along and spending most of my mental energy in being impressed by the author's turn of phrase or expert scene creation. I was completely taken by surprise by the turn the book took towards the end, and the main thing that bothered me was not the direction that the action took in the story, but the way the characters reacted to it. I don't want to say too much about the plot twist because I fear I will be giving too much away to those that are going to read the book, but after a certain point, I didn't think that the reactions of the surrounding characters were very realistic, especially in the case of Binhammer. It was almost as if he changed some of the fundamental aspects of his character. After examining it more closely, I also draw the conclusion that perhaps the reader doesn't know the true Binhammer until the ending of the book, and that these revelations about his character had always been there just waiting to be exposed under the right circumstances. Whatever the case may be, I felt that the ending left me a little bewildered, if not taken aback. I don't think that my bewilderment at the conclusion of the book drastically affected my enjoyment of it, and to a certain degree, I think it may have changed or even enriched the complexity of the story, so I can't really say that the ending was a disappointment. Rather I will say that I think it was a little unexpected and made me reshape the terms under which I was reading.

There were a lot of wonderful aspects to this story and I think that if you are the type of person to appreciate witty and satirical writing, this is definitely the book for you. The plot and character creation were first rate, as was the smooth writing. This is not only a great book to lose yourself in, it is a book that will make you think and evaluate the power of interpersonal relationships. A great read.

Stuck in an awkward, adolescent phase are the students of this book, some of its adult characters and, indeed, the novel itself. It's an awkward, gawky read, not really a book of related short stories yet so slow and meandering as a novel that it fails to carry any dramatic momentum. Plot lines, such as they are, disappear arbitrarily (as, for example, the main male character's flirtatious visits to a colleague's home) or take forever to crest and peak. The central incident of the story, a love affair, has its ramifications lazily contemplated by all three participants; they're either too modern or desiccated to have real passions, yet they ponder the act intellectually forever. It's like being taught Romeo & Juliet by someone who was never in love. Spoiler alert: A teacher makes love with a student who is seen by someone coming out of the teacher's apartment late at night. There's never a question as to who the "someone" is: another student, an adult, who?

Stylistically the book is just as frustrating. For every well-turned phrase - and they are here - there are those that are turgid and feel false. Asked to describe their situation, one English teacher says to another it's "adumbrated." If anyone doesn't use that word in normal conversation, it's one English teacher to another for risk of being labeled, well, sesquipedalian. Stranger still are the musings of the student girls who sound nothing at all like my own high school daughter or her friends.

But again, the book fails because its stories are flat. Numerous intertwining tales make Trollope and Dickens what they are, but each story has a real dramatic arc. Here the effect of so many tepid tales is, paradoxically, to make the book that much more impenetrable.

This book is well crafted and enjoyable to read! I found it very difficult to put down. Gaylord's characters compliment each other lovely and are believable. In both my adolescent and adult life I have met similar characters. Filled with drama and intrigue, this book is a must read!

I enjoyed the book, and could hardly put it down! I especially enjoyed the nonstop excitement. Even if something was not directly happening to Binhammer, the protagonist, there was some kind of conflict or tension for another character. Very well written, and the characters even remind me a bit of my own high school.