Book Review: A Literary Attempt at a YA School Story Mystery

The Temple House Vanishing, by Rachel Donohue (Algonquin Books)

I requested an ARC of this book based on the description: a mystery set in a Catholic boarding school. Twenty-five years before the opening, Louisa, a brilliant but lonely student, and Mr. Lavelle, a charismatic art teacher, have mysteriously disappeared. Victoria, who knew them both, has just committed suicide at the school itself. Why did she kill herself? What happened to Louisa and Mr. Lavelle? Did they elope together? Were they murdered or did they perish through an accident? Or were the disappearances unrelated? The atmosphere of an isolated Victorian mansion set on a cliff in Ireland added to the appeal.

Very early in the book, however, I became increasingly disappointed and frustrated. By the end, I was ready to throw the book across the room in disgust, except that I was reading it on my Kindle and I don’t treat my electronic devices so cavalierly. Based on the description, The Temple House Vanishing promised me a genre novel – YA, school story, and mystery, all in one – and yet it consistently violated the conventions of all three, and not in a skillful way.

The opening point of view, a journalist who happened to live on the same street as Louisa and who is investigating the disappearance, was hard to relate to and never made any sense to me. She isn’t involved in the events, and her own life, irrelevant to the rest of the story, seemed remote and uninteresting. Then we get into Louisa’s story, narrated by herself. Therein lies the second hurdle, because Louisa doesn’t sound or act like a teen, even one who’s stuck in her head. Almost all teens, whether intellectual “brains” or not, center their lives around the fundamental issues of those years: independence from parents, confusion about who they are and what they want to become, desperate need for approval from peers, and so forth. Hormones saturate their bloodstreams, and the parts of their brains associated with executive functions, delayed gratification, and long-term planning, won’t mature until their mid-20s. It doesn’t matter how bright or academically gifted they are, they are still at the mercy of these internal storms. Louisa’s first-person narrative reads like the overly elitist pontifications of a writer with a very poor memory of her own teenaged years, or perhaps one seen through extremely adult-colored lenses, and with no understanding of the conventions of the genre. I cannot imagine a teen reader finding Louisa believable or interesting.

Then we meet Victoria, who becomes the object of Louisa’s bloodless passion. Both girls exhibit a disconnection between their intellectual philosophizing and their relationships so extreme as to verge into psychotic dissociation. I never perceived, through their speech or behavior, or through the inner voice of the narrative, any shred of genuine emotion until very near the end, when it became clear that Louisa was just as infatuated with Victoria as Victoria was with Mr. Lavelle. But for the most part, each experiences a pale, distant imitation of obsession, not the visceral stuff of teen suicide pacts or Romeo and Juliet. Not a hint of lesbian romance, requited or not, could I discern.

Despite these drawbacks, the mystery pulled me along. I skimmed long passages of more-of-the-same-airy-head-stuff, just to find out how it was that Louisa disappeared with Mr. Lavelle and not Victoria, who was convinced he was going to take her away to Europe. To get there, I had to wade through one unpleasant not-a-teenager after another. And to wonder what in the world the adults at the school were thinking to allow vicious rumor, bullying, and inappropriate teacher-student intimacy to continue unremarked. For heaven’s sake, this is a Catholic school; surely they would make a gesture at adult supervision.

Then came the big revelation and the death blow to any vestige of credibility the novel held for me: it turns out that Louisa died at the time of the disappearance, and her remains have never been found. Her voice has been narrating the story all along, but without any hint of her being a ghost. Did the author mean to indicate this by the peculiar and pervasive lack of emotional immediacy? Or did she just not understand that in genre fiction – in any good fiction – you simply cannot set a reader up for one kind of story and then pull a literary rabbit out of the hat with an entirely different one? In no way did the author establish that in this literary world, consciousness persists beyond death. As a reader who was trying hard to understand, and also as a writer of genre fiction myself, I felt betrayed. My time and care had been abused. If the novel weren’t so long, I’d recommend it to my writing students as an example of what not to do.

Fiction works along principles, and those principles are based on the human psyche. Good fiction of any kind engages the reader’s interest and sympathies in specific ways, shaping tension and release. The opening offers an implied contract between author and reader. In essence, the author says, “Place yourself in my hands and this is the kind of experience you will have.” To begin a story with shoot-‘em-up action and end with sappy romance, for example, or to begin with a mystery set in a boarding school and then go, “Surprise! The protagonist is really dead!” is to violate that contract and lose the reader’s trust. I’ve detailed above how the author repeatedly lost my confidence. I don’t think I’ll give her work a second chance.