Mixing broad satire with magical realism, Robert Joseph Foley's novel deconstructs one American high school piece by piece, leaving it broken and on the cusp of a disaster. As it shows itself in the course of the narrative, Lingor High School is a barely functional place where faculty and administration clash interminably and students meander irrelevantly in their wake. ...
.... the narrative continues in ways almost any teacher (and more than a few students) should appreciate. Petty academic politics drive faculty and administration hopelessly apart while plots and counterplots rage and the student body glumly soldiers on.
Symbolized by a smoking, rusty old Peugeot diesel sedan that somehow survives long enough to be passed from one generation of teacher to the next, Lingor High somehow survives as well, belching its way through endless squabbles, insanely wrong choices, and the unexplained suicide of a star student. Finally, it all comes to head in a game of "donkey ball," in which faculty and students shoot baskets from the backs of heavily sedated beasts of burden.
Ending up in a courtroom bursting with paranoia and muddled thinking, the novel probably has too much going on for its own good. Despite its faults, though, its insightful and comic take on the American high school and, by extension, American education in general strikes many of the right notes with verve and precision.
A series of satirical vignettes from novelist Foley (These Little Poems of Death and after Life, 2010) about the hijinks and school politics among the faculty at a suburban high school.
At fictional Lingor High School, the faculty will stop at nothing to get aheador at least avoid being stabbed in the back. The assorted vignettes, which span four decades, focus on different characters, often resurrecting characters who were of peripheral importance in other sections. They range from the obsolete master teacher ousted by younger administrators to students whose talents are smothered by overzealous parents or abusive coaches. Foley focuses especially on Timothy Barbieri, who attended Lingor High School as a student and returned immediately after college to begin his teaching career. Poor Timothy is disheartened to discover that being on the faculty at LHS is all about finding the right allies, not about the art of teaching. During Timothy's time at Lingor, his personal rivalry with the enigmatic principal, Mlle. Ameline, ebbs and flows in a hilarious fashion. The tongue-and-cheek narration and astute observations about human behavior are drawn from Foley's personal background as a former teacher. Not only does he address what's really inside the unmarked bottle always found in the employee refrigerator, but he also gets to the heart of unjust advancement and premature termination in bureaucratic work environments. The narrative voice varies widely among the vignettes, ranging from the pompously eruditei.e., poetic phrasing about "Tennyson's jutting proboscis"to the shockingly base: The principal "would market the breath of her crotch if she thought it would bring in money." Though the book is a bit longer than necessary and would greatly benefit from aggressive editing, the punchy storyline keeps the pages turning.
An amusingly offbeat parody that will appeal to quirky academics.