Girl’s Simple Story Rich in Stream-of-Consciousness Ambiguities

Heather McGowan is a young woman and “Schooling” is her first novel, but she brings us old-fashioned pleasures. Stream-of-consciousness narration was avant-garde 70 or 80 years ago, when William Faulkner and James Joyce were shocking their readers with radical dislocations of the conventional story line.

We haven’t seen much of it lately, though. Convention has won out, or maybe the novel (compared, say, with video games) is no longer one of our culture’s main channels of innovation.

Whatever the reason, today’s English-language novel is apt to be less adventurous stylistically than its counterpart of three-quarters of a century ago. Elmore Leonard recently advised writers to aim for a transparent and anonymous prose that doesn’t get between the reader and the story. This works fine for Leonard--as a theory, that is; his style, as fans know, isn’t anonymous at all. But it would hardly work for McGowan.

“Schooling” is a simple, if ambiguous, story told with great verve, flash and excess. As when reading the old modernists, we often don’t know whether to gasp at the beauties of language and glints of perception that greet us on each page or to grouse that the stream-of-consciousness method makes us work much harder than we should to establish a few basic facts.

Is the method necessary to deliver the story’s full meaning, or does the story seem meaningful just because it’s difficult to read?

Faulkner, in “The Sound and the Fury,” used stream of consciousness to indicate the suicidal depression of young Quentin Compson and the mental retardation of his brother, Benjy. It also symbolized the disintegration of the Compson family, in general, though characters who were smarter (Jason) or saner (Dilsey) told their versions of the story more directly.

Joyce’s strategy in “Ulysses” was different. He took people within the normal range--Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and Bloom’s wife, Molly--and used stream of consciousness to examine the mental states (reverie, drunkenness, exultation, etc.) they passed through in a day.

McGowan is Faulknerian in a sense: The heroine of “Schooling,” 13-year-old Catrine Evans, is a troubled girl. Her mother has died of cancer. Her Welsh-born father has moved them from Maine to London. She sees him only on holidays, for he has enrolled her in the same boarding school, Monstead, that he attended when he was a boy and it was an all-boys school. Catrine misses her best girlfriend in Maine and is haunted by the memory, or delusion, that they might have accidentally killed a man.

Monstead, it seems, has declined since her father’s day. Catrine encounters glue-sniffers and arsonists and anti-American prejudice. A boy--nasty? smitten?--shoves her against a tree. Her teachers seem fussy and musty, except for Mr. Gilbert, her chemistry master, who is kind and witty and handsome and artistic.

He pays attention to Catrine and she thrives on it, even as we’re nagged by the thought that he’s a little too attentive, given that she’s a vulnerable teenager in his charge.

“All I wanted was for you to lift me up,” Catrine tells Gilbert toward the end, when she has caught him in certain lies and realized that, painful as it might be, she can do her own uplifting, thank you.

For McGowan, finally, proves to be closer to Joyce. Catrine may be needy, but she’s a normal girl. The verbal pyrotechnics aren’t limited to her point of view. Everyone shares in the novel’s shimmering, rueful vision, which includes a “play” with stage directions, as in the Nighttown section of “Ulysses,” and a closing Molly-like soliloquy.

Some of the tricks may not be necessary, but they’re fun. McGowan, indeed, can be very funny, in the English manner--not in the American, oddly enough.

Catrine, unfazed by cold weather, sloughs off her Yank perspective before we get any real sense of it.

Now, a California girl, that might have made an even better story ....