In a literary marketplace that sometimes seems oversupplied with novels about brittle intellectuals feeling alienated from their emotions, or twentysomethings grinding axes about their exes, there is the wonder of Eleanor Catton: a novelist of lavish technical gifts who addresses herself to the world, broadly and richly conceived.
Catton’s first novel, 2008’s The Rehearsal, was a small miracle. Leaping acrobatically between fictional and metafictional modes, it tells the story of a secondary-school scandal (male teacher, female student) restaged by trainees at a local drama school. There is something almost Brechtian about the way it shocks you out of familiar fictional comfort zones, and something almost Wildean in the way it lobs its arch perceptions, like glittering little hand grenades, at all sorts of social and artistic pieties.
