The unnamed 28-year-old narrator of Avigayl Sharp’s debut novel teaches literature at a girls’ boarding school in the US, and is not OK. She has lost touch with her friends, is hooked on prescription stimulants and cries too easily. She is also sexually uptight, which she attributes to childhood trauma, and weirdly obsessed with Joseph Stalin (“his brutality, and his paranoia, reminded me very much of my mother”).
The pupils at the school are brittle and entitled. One of them opines: “This guy Kafka kept acting like everything was out of his control … I thought, why don’t you take a little initiative, buddy?” Another “let her head drop back against the window, exhausted from the effort of speech” after uttering three sentences in a class discussion. They’re not terribly keen on reading – “due to the devastating psychic effects of daily technological overstimulation” – so she assigns them Charles Dickens’s 900-page novel, Bleak House.
