In the Fall They Come Back
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
A brilliantly observed prep school novel about fraught teacher-student relationships--and about coming into adulthood.
Ben Jameson begins his teaching career in a small private school in Northern Virginia. He is idealistic, happy to have his first job after graduate school, and hoping some day to figure out what he really wants out of life. And in his two years teaching English at Glenn Acres Preparatory School, he comes to believe this really is his life's work, his calling. He wants to change lives.
But his desire to "save" his students leads him into complicated territory, as he becomes more and more deeply involved with three students in particular: an abused boy, a mute and damaged girl, and a dangerous eighteen-year-old who has come back to school for one more chance to graduate.
In the Fall They Come Back is a book about human relationships, as played out in that most fraught of settings, a school. But it is not only a book about teaching. It is about the limits and complexities of even our most benevolent urges--what we can give to others and how we lose ourselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bausch tells the penetrating story of idealistic, newly graduated Ben Jameson, a hopeful young English teacher at Glenn Acres Preparatory School in Virginia. Enchanted by his own grandiose notions of inspiring young minds and changing young peoples' lives, Ben flouts the typical English lesson plans, as well as the conventions of teacher-student relationships; he wants to "get in amongst them and stir them up." Despite warnings from his girlfriend, the school principal, and more experienced (and more cynical) colleagues, Ben becomes increasingly involved in the lives of his students: he wonders at one student's history of sexual molestation, he hopes to save another from abuse, and he becomes enraptured by a beautiful but troubled girl who has returned to the school for a fifth year with one last chance to graduate. Bausch perceptively explores the complexities and dangers of idealism and the motivations behind altruism. The book's greatest strength is its portrayal of the earnest yet misguided Ben as being ignorant to the fact that the more he "helps," the more damage he inflicts.
