Unwelcome Light

David Lehner, a private school teacher, has written in Unwelcome Light a powerful, riveting, disturbing prep school novel, to join the company of such novels as John Knowles’s A Separate Peace, Tobias Wolff’s Old School, and Alice Hoffman’s The River King. In each of these novels, including Lehner’s, the closed society of a boarding school is like a city-state where curses can fester. It is appropriate that the unnamed protagonist and narrator of Unwelcome Light is a teacher of classics at an American private boarding school, for this novel is a modern enactment of tragic themes as old as Sophocles. Because of family secrets to which he is not privy, the narrator comes close enough to committing incest (unknowingly and even innocently) to be judged guilty, and to be punished for the sin, cursed to live out his days in anguish. The understated parallel to the Oedipus story is enhanced by the mystery of the narrator's parentage, a nest of secrets that a “chorus” of colleagues know but won't reveal until it's too late. Although the ironies that shape both stories are similar, the parallels between Unwelcome Light and Greek tragedy are not strict or obvious. The novel is packed with dark themes, but it is also driven by modern plot twists and populated by complex secondary characters with psychological problems and secrets of their own. These problems include adultery, mental illness, theft, alcoholism, and various forms of deviant sexuality. In spite of its dark themes, Unwelcome Light is a page-turning, plot-driven novel, intelligent and written with craft and skill.