Product Description

With superb craftsmanship, effortlessly suspenseful pacing, and tenderly observed insight, Lily King expertly limns the life of an independent single mother and her fifteen-year-old son, who is on a circuitous path toward a truth she has long concealed from him. Fifteen years ago Vida Avery arrived alone and pregnant at elite Fayer Academy. By living on campus, on an island off the New England coast, Vida has cocooned herself and her son, Peter, from the outside world and from an inside secret. For years she has lived largely through the books she teaches, but when she accepts the impulsive marriage proposal of ardent widower Tom Belou, the prescribed life Vida has constructed is swiftly dismantled. As Vida begins teaching her signature book, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, a tale of an ostracized woman and social injustice, its themes begin to echo eerily in her own life and Peter sees that the mother he perceived as indomitable is collapsing and it is up to him to help. The English Teacher is a passionate tale of a mother and son’s vital bond and a provocative look at our notions of intimacy, honesty, loyalty, family, and the real meaning of home.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #374263 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. A marriage of single parents is more often the stuff of sitcoms than of serious novels, but King (The Pleasing Hour) uses it to great effect in this intense character study. Single mother Vida Avery teaches English at an exclusive northeastern private high school and has a host of protective rituals that keep her life with adolescent son Peter basically on track; she also allows everyone, including boyfriend Tom, to think that she had been married to Peter's father. Peter, who has longed for an intact family, is thrilled when Vida accepts the proposal of Tom, a widower with three children—albeit in an ambivalent manner full of simmering private rage. Whiting winner King renders Vida's seething withholding in a free, direct style that captures everything from knowing responses toward a male co-worker ("who wanted to play jilted suitor, not because he had loved her, but because she had not loved him") to her dreams of killing Peter. She's also excellent on the children's reactions to each other as the households come together and then separate, dramatically and perhaps permanently. King keeps Vida in tight focus throughout, even as the wrenching story of Peter's conception slowly comes to light.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Vida Avery teaches literature at a New England prep school. She arrived at its doors 15 years earlier with her baby and a mysterious past. She is considered the best English teacher at Fayer Academy and she maintains rigid control of her classroom, tolerating no tangents, personal discussion, or questions. She tries to keep that same control over her life, which is why she shocks everyone, including herself, by marrying Tom Belou, a widower with three children. Her teenaged son, Peter, is thrilled to be moving from their quarters on the campus to a real house with a real family, but he finds that his stepsiblings are still grieving for their mother. His mother's closely guarded emotional world begins to unravel and she suffers a complete breakdown. The 1980 Iran Hostage Crisis provides the backdrop for the story, paralleling Vida's sense of being a captive in her marriage, but the stronger metaphor is Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the tragic tale of an unwed mother, which Vida begins teaching the Monday after her wedding. Only when she reveals to Peter the truth about their past can any healing begin. King's engaging writing beautifully illuminates the complicated relationships and emotions of everyone involved. It is a story of isolation, patience, and love, and of people trying to find comfort in one another. The author's style is unsentimental and direct, and the compelling story draws readers right in.-Susanne Bardelson, Kitsap Regional Library, WA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
For a former English teacher, picking up a novel called The English Teacher required a leap of faith. There's the risk of running into that egomaniac so widely adored in stories about English teachers, a subgenre that reached its low point with Robin Williams's mawkish performance in "Dead Poets Society." Michelle Pfeiffer was hotter in "Dangerous Minds," but she followed essentially the same lesson plan, with the same test results: one student dead and a nation inspired.

For the millions of responsible teachers more interested in explaining literature than saving souls, such portrayals are an embarrassment to the class. And so it was a relief to find that the heroine in Lily King's new novel makes a fascinating counterpoint to these celebrated emotional leeches. Vida Avery is the best teacher at Fayer Academy, a wealthy prep school on an island off the coast of New England. During her 15-year career, Vida has been offered every honor and position such a school can bestow on its finest, but she's resisted these allurements. She remains cloistered in an old attic classroom, a position that simultaneously emphasizes her modesty and her specialness.

Vida's legendary classes on English and American literature lead students through discussions of themes, characters, settings and styles. She tolerates no distractions, tangents or sloppy expressions in speech or prose. When her sophomores try to draw her off track with personal questions, she immediately brings them back to a novel by Thomas Hardy: "Let's talk about Tess. She's far more interesting." Rather than coyly encouraging their intimacies, she feels "impatient with them for stepping behind the curtain of her private life." She doesn't want them to love her; she wants them to love literature.

But we quickly learn that Vida's pedagogical discipline stems from her unhealthy avoidance of real life. "She wasn't interested in the present," King writes. "Moments in novels were unforgettable, while in real life the details slipped quickly away." Something has happened, we're led to believe -- something ghastly and unthinkable that caused Vida to abandon her past and remake herself 15 years ago when she appeared on the steps of Fayer Academy with a baby. Since then, she's lived on the island campus, raised her son with hawk-like attention, gained a reputation for being a strict but brilliant teacher and avoided all emotional entanglements.

Which makes her sudden marriage to a recent widower, Tom Belou, a complete shock to everyone -- including herself. "What had she done?" she keeps asking herself. "She wished she'd never said she loved him. She was just being polite, returning the compliment late one evening." But now here she is, shattering the safe little life she's managed to construct for herself and her son and throwing them both into a new house, with new children (Tom's three) still grieving for their dead mother. From the wedding night on, Vida is a mess: frigid in the bedroom, nervous in the kitchen, shrill at the table. She has no idea what to do with these new stepchildren, how Tom can love her, or why she married him.

And neither do we. As in her debut novel, The Pleasing Hour, King has taken the old vaudeville advice to heart: "Leave 'em wanting more." She may, in fact, be too devoted to that maxim. The English Teacher suffers from a kind of literary anorexia; there's not enough meat on these characters or enough connective tissue on the bones of this plot. Though we eventually learn what trauma forced Vida to reinvent herself all those years ago (not too hard to guess), we never get answers to the more important questions raised by these characters' relationships in the present. (Why does she get married? Why does he stay with her?)

The wedding takes place in 1979, on the same day the U.S. embassy staff is taken hostage in Iran, which serves as a provocative but ultimately irrelevant metaphor for Vida's sense of entrapment. More promising are the frequent references to Tess of the d'Urbervilles, which Vida begins teaching the Monday after her wedding. But here, too, the allusions are more illusory than illuminating, and even readers who find Hardy unbearable would have to admit that he never leaves us feeling uninformed.

King is at her best with her portrayal of the teenage children forced together by their parents' inexplicable marriage. Vida's son is a particularly endearing character: "He would begin his life as a regular person," he thinks, "who ate his meals not in a cafeteria but in a kitchen." At the wedding reception, he can barely contain his excitement: "Tonight they'd go home to a regular house on a regular street, husband and wife in the master bedroom and four kids sprinkled in rooms down a hallway." In scenes that are funny, touching and sad, that naive hope is severely tested but not entirely crushed by the awkward integration with his new siblings, who view him and his mother as interlopers.

Unfortunately, the marriage at the center of the novel never attains the emotional substance of this side story involving the stepchildren. King is a wonderfully engaging writer who creates characters and situations we can't resist, but I kept raising my hand with questions about The English Teacher -- oh please, over here! -- until the bell rang and it was over.

Reviewed by Ron Charles
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

"This was the nameless emotion she felt most in life, this abrasion of love meeting anger"
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.

A Captivating Story You Won't Forget
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.

A Tough and Hopeful Tale
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.