Schooling Book

This got a certain amount of criticism for being stylistically too difficult - NY Times reviewer: "Heather McGowan's first novel is, in the most fundamental meaning of the word, unreadable: it cannot be read, which isn't to say that there aren't other ways to experience or even enjoy it", but in fact you can let your eyes travel over all the words and know what is going on at least 80% of the time. On one level, a British boarding school novel that makes one almost tempted to invoke Stalky & Co, the story and the characters are not hard to grasp; the difficulty is in the kaleidoscopically changing point of view, the by-now fairly well-known stream of consciousness narration style that attempts to replicate on the page the ways in which thought and speech do not fall into neat prose. There's something almost cinematic (a la Robert Altman) about the interweaving and overlapping conversational snippets.