The Coming Storm - Hardcover

Russell, Paul; Russell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312205147 ISBN 13: 9780312205140

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1999

Synopsis

Told through the alternating viewpoints of four individuals, The Coming Storm centers around a traditional upper-class boys' school in upstate New York. Louis Tremper, the headmaster at the Forge School, his wife, Claire, Tracy Parker, a twenty-five-year-old gay man recently hired to teach at the school, and Noah Lathrop III, a troubled fifteen-year-old student - each character must struggle with inner demons, desires, and conflicting loyalties. As their lives move to a crisis point, dark episodes from the school's past collide with the current, growing confusion that reigns when Tracy and Noah get entangled in an illicit relationship.

About this title

About the Author:

Paul Russell is Professor of English at Vassar College.

From Kirkus Reviews:

The lessons of E.M. Forster's carefully encoded fiction and of John Knowles's prep school classic, A Separate Peace, have been skillfully absorbed into this ambitious portrayal of contemporary gay relationships by the author of Boys of Life (1991), etc. The novel is a painstaking interweaving of the lives of four characters (whose several viewpoints observe the storys action) in residence at the upstate New York Forge School, a Groton or Exeter-like academy that caters to the underachieving sons of the wealthy. Case in point: 15-year-old Noah Lathrop III, a moody, undisciplined bright kid reluctantly confronting the probability that he's homosexual. Noah's inchoate feelings inevitably focus on Tracy Parker, a handsome gay teacher (ten years Noah's senior) whose commitment to the Forge School ostensibly represents ``his clean break from. . . . [New York] city, the entanglements it had come to stand for.'' The intimacy that Noah and Tracy stumble into also impinges upon Forge's headmaster, Louis Tremper, a 60ish administrator whose unfinishable scholarly research on Thomas Mann masks his own carefully suppressed sexual secrets; and upon Louis's stalwart wife Claire, whose very capabilities ironically help sustain the couples ``companionable'' (if loveless) marriage. The titles ``coming storm,'' which assumes multiple symbolic and literal forms throughout, is AIDSwhich Tracy passively expects will claim him, a fact oddly figuring in Noah's possible liberation and maturing. The novel is distinguished by narrative clarity and succinctness and by Russell's intelligent exploration of his characters' quite credible vacillations between passion and indifference, candor and deceitbut its crucially weakened by its trite, bathetic sexual explicitness: these people's inner lives are far more interesting than their (after all, drearily generic) couplings. One finishes this frustratingly uneven fiction feeling that, had it been written 40 years ago, it might have been a first-rate novel. Still, even as is, it's probably Russell's best yet. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0312205147
• ISBN 13: 9780312205140
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 371