The Rehearsal Book

Eleanor Catton is a witch. I say this out of great respect, as I was taught to do by my Fake Auntie Barbara, who is also a witch. I know that Catton is a witch because:

i) I do not care about sexuality in fiction. It's been done to death (primarily, I suspect, because it lets writers, who like to think they're pure as the driven snow, feel like victims. Most writers, of course, are wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of the rest of the human population and got that way because of a wide range of historical injustices). It lets writers think they have something interesting to say about The Human Condition when they have nothing to say about actual human lives.

ii) I don't much care about coming of age novels, because most teenagers are dull, repetitive, irritating and more or less subhuman. The ones that aren't don't act like teenagers, and coming of age novels involving them are thus weird and not really coming of age novels.

iii) I do not believe the whole world's a stage.

iv) With few exceptions, I don't like jazz.

So Catton has written a coming of age novel, which is primarily about sexuality and The Theater, and focuses on the symbolism of jazz saxophones. You'll note that, despite all this, I really liked this book.

But there is more evidence still. There are books, good books, which are unreadable for the first x chapters. Consider Catch 22, which I at least found boring and baffling for the first 100 pages... and then fell for, hard, as hard as a teenage saxophonist. Or Death in Venice, which did nothing for me for about the first third, but so much for me in the last two thirds that I've gone on to read Dr Faustus *twice*. And I'm not at all masochistic. Mann just does it.

The Rehearsal is an outlier even on this scale, though. For the first 200--200!--pages, I was mostly put off. I had no desire to keep reading. The two narratives seemed to have nothing to do with each other; the stylistic fireworks grew tired quickly (about half of the book takes place somewhere between reality and a saxophone teacher's perception of that reality, which is symbolized by characters being lit as if on stage); points i) through iv) had been firmly established. I figured I'd finish it, because it was shortish and the Luminaries is apparently the greatest shit ever. But I was just as likely to play video games as pick the book up.

And then the two narratives came together and I became a lunatic obsessive about finishing the book. My wife typically asks how a book was once I'm done, and I say things like "It was good, except for x, y and z, and I don't think the author put enough thought into a, and I don't know. I liked it okay." That's the books I really like. And she says, "Are you going to read [author's other book]?" "Maybe. Not right now."

But with The Rehearsal, the conversation went like this:

"How was it?"
"Great."
"Huh. Are you going to read the Luminaries?"
"Yes. You should read this. It's really great."

Enough beating my chest. Why is it so good? Well, Catton takes those tired topics and, implausibly, makes something new from them by looking at how adults perceive teenage coming of age sexuality, how they/we exploit it, distort it, and impose our own codes and experiences on the young.

She writes about being a teenage boy more touchingly than any ex-teenage boy (for them, apparently, life was mostly about The Penis. For me, as for Catton's young man, life was about substantially more important things, as well as learning to cope with aforementioned Penis).

She writes with awareness of the constructedness of her own fiction (i.e., the book is a stage), but without any suggestion that the constructedness of it makes it less valid. It's almost as if the constructedness is something to enjoy, because it makes it possible to tell truths about the non-fictional world (in the case of this book: that growing up is akin to rehearsing for the outside world, i.e., it is not the case that all the world's a stage at all, it's far more terrible than that, and you should revel in the moments when you can act out fictions).

And she writes about homosexuality, without Writing About Homosexuality. It's just that between one and three of her characters would rather make out with someone of their own gender. If that's an issue for you, that's on you. The book does not care about your stupid issues, though it does care very much about the way the world treats those one to three characters (i.e., shabbily). I grant you, that sounds weird. Almost as if it's hard to explain using reason.

Almost as if the author is a witch.