SCHOOL DAYS

Boarding school life and loves in the 1960s.

Sam Brandt, the protagonist of well-known editor and poet Galassi’s second novel, is an alumnus of Leverett, a Connecticut boarding school that had “always exuded an aura of meritocratic rather than purely pecuniary elitism.” Some 20 years after graduation he returns to the school to teach English. When the Head of School receives a claim of long-ago sexual abuse from one of Sam’s classmates, he asks Sam to investigate the accusation against former faculty member Theo Gibson, “the most inventive, demanding, popular teacher in the school” and someone who served as Sam’s “sounding board and source of wisdom.” The novel shifts into a lengthy flashback from Sam’s perspective, describing the complicated choreography of sexual desire at the school in its final years as a male-only institution, and specifically how students like him were forced by the mores of the time to suppress any overt expression of their desire, as “love among the boys was tacitly acknowledged and rigorously guarded against.” In Sam’s case, that included an intense, but utterly chaste, relationship with Eddie Braddock, a “dazzling, combustible kid” in Sam’s eyes. He was “desperate for Eddie’s touch, yet he was determined, too, that the nobility of their bond not be tainted by neurosis.” When the story returns to its contemporary setting, capped off by a brief coda at the class of 1967’s 50th reunion, Galassi reveals how this sexual repression has damaged the lives of Sam and his friends—in Sam’s case, a marriage that produced a child has ended when it could no longer endure the truth of his sexual orientation—but at least hints at the possibility of recovery in late middle age. While the novel could have benefited from the elimination of some peripheral characters, Galassi’s understated style and economical prose are well suited to this elegiac story.

A thoughtful exploration of the lingering effects of repressed sexual identity.