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    A Good School: A Novel
    A Good School: A Novel
    A Good School: A Novel
    Ebook199 pages2 hours

    A Good School: A Novel

    By Richard Yates

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Richard Yates, who died in 1992, is today ranked by many readers, scholars, and critics alongside such titans of modern American fiction as Updike, Roth, Irving, Vonnegut, and Mailer.

    In this work, he offers a spare and autumnal novel about a New England prep school. At once a meditation on the twilight of youth and an examination of America's entry into World War II, A Good School tells the stories of William Grove, the quiet boy who becomes an editor of the school newspaper; Jack Draper, a crippled chemistry teacher; and Edith Stone, the schoolmaster's young daughter, who falls in love with most celebrated boy in the class of 1943.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJul 29, 2014
    ISBN9781466853676
    Author

    Richard Yates

    Richard Yates was the author of the novels Revolutionary Road, A Special Providence, Disturbing the Peace, The Easter Parade, A Good School, Young Hearts Crying, and Cold Spring Harbor, as well as the short story collections Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love. He died in 1992.

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    Reviews for A Good School

    3.5/5

    96 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Pretty good boarding school/adolescent novel...nothing unusually good but a decent read.
    • 3/5
      I liked this book much less than others I have read written by Richard Yates. I felt there was too much information, not enough clarity, and so very much bad behavior. It is hard to believe that all of these incidents are based on truth, and that there were no intercessions. I rated it as highly as I did because I learned from the parts that may have been based on real experiences.
    • 4/5
      A good school by Richard Yates is another novel in the long tradition of "public school writing". The introduction by the author seems a bit tongue-in-cheek, confusing me as whether to see this as autobiographical or pure fiction. I felt the first part of the book more enticing than the later part.
    • 2/5
      To begin with, I thought this was really bad. Am I the only person who likes books less the more I learn how autobiographical they are? I hope and assume not. But at the end of the day, it wasn't so terrible. It's an ensemble novel really, although Grove might be more central than other characters. But only a bit. Not much in the way of story, but an amusing collection of anecdotes to do with some interesting characters. Not a bad way to spend a couple of hours, but nothing more.
    • 4/5
      When I reviewed Richard Yates' novel Revolutionary Road I wrote that it was "a perfectly-written book" and "a modern classic in the true sense of the word." In his novel A Good School, published seventeen years later, I found a classic of a different sort in that I believe in this later work he captured a certain spirit of place and time perfectly. Even though the book did not seem to me as being perfect in writing style, the economy of Yates' prose still impressed me. Even more striking was his ability to convey the feeling of a certain time in the lives of a few representative boys while, at the same time, creating a pervasive feeling of an historic setting and place. The description of the school made clear it was unique among the prep schools of New England and that the small select group of boys that called it their home were just as unique in their own way. The awkward and nervous boy who becomes editor of the school newspaper is just one example of the different students that shared their school years at this good, if not unflawed, school. The awakening of character and the changes in the boys lives seemed to lead inexorably to an ending that made this novel and the titular school memorable.Yates used vignettes about the boys' social interactions, some of which seem mundane, but which cumulatively demonstrate the growth and change in their young lives. The drama of the real world with World War II always in the shadows is always impinging on the action and sometimes bursts in to interrupt. Thus the small world of the Dorset School seems to be sheltered from the world without until events of the world around it overwhelm the adolescent angst within it.The result of reading this novel is to remind me that I must read more of Yates oeuvre as the experience is exhilarating.

    Book preview

    A Good School - Richard Yates

    Chapter 1

    At fifteen, Terry Flynn had the face of an angel and the body of a perfect athlete. He was built on a small scale, but he was utterly beautiful. Walking fully dressed among his friends, he moved with a light, nimble, special grace that set him apart from everyone; just by watching him walk you could picture the way he would leap to catch a forward pass, evade any number of potential tacklers and run alone into the end zone for the winning touchdown as the crowd went wild.

    And if Terry looked good in his clothes, that was nothing compared to his performance every day in the dormitory when he stripped, wrapped a towel around his waist and made his way down the hall to the showers. He had what is called muscle definition: every bulge and cord and ripple of him was outlined as if by the bite of a classical sculptor’s chisel, and he carried himself accordingly. Hi, Terry, the boys would call as he passed, and Hey, Terry; within a very few days after his arrival at Dorset Academy, Terry Flynn had become the only new boy in Three building to be universally called by his first name.

    In the shower room, which also contained the two toilet stalls and four sinks on that end of the hall, he was splendid. He would make a modest little show of whisking the towel away from his loins, proving he was hung like a horse; then he would step into the hot spray and stand there posing, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, a soaked and glistening statue. The little-finger of his right hand had been broken once in a football game and never mended properly; it wouldn’t bend, and the delicate stiffness of that finger, which looked at first like an affectation, lent just the right note of insouciance to his

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