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While this story began for me with power and energy, it faded in the stretch (sorry for the sports metaphor). I got the point early on and believe that the book could have benefited from losing at least 50 pages. In a way, and I know this sounds odd, it's both the author's fault and ability. She hooked me with a complex story, but then wrote characters that I grew to dislike so much that I wanted out of the book. We're not talking stalkers or psychopaths or violent monsters, but unsympathetic, self-absorbed, whiny and/or pretentious people. Gregor Demarkian is apparently retired from the FBI's Behavior Sciences Unit and is at loose ends. He receives a phone call from Mark, a teenager he knows, asking for help. The boy's roommate at his private school has committed suicide and Mark sounds seriously in need of help. Gregor's unhappiness is pretty obvious too; he vaguely has suggested to his companion that they marry. He can't seem to figure out why she's less than pleased -- not that she expects rings and kneeling down but at least he could have looked at her when he made this vague not very heartfelt suggestion. She's not really pleased with him, waiting for him to get it; I'm on her side. I remember reading a book or two featuring Demarkian years ago. I don't remember why I stopped reading the series; I just found other books to read. And for the first 200 pages of this book, I wondered why the heck I'd stopped. Haddam is a skilled writer, teasing out details of setting and personality well. But eventually I tired of almost everything about the book; the rather desperate unhappiness of everyone at Windsor Academy, from the superficial attitudes of the teacher who comes from the midwest and doesn't feel like she fits (even though she swears off cheeseburgers and drinks the right kind of tea -- oh dear) to the bored and ridiculous headmaster's wife, Alice whose major form of entertainment, it seems is seducing a student every year, declaiming all the while about her oppression. This year she's got Michael, who is so totally wrong for Windsor, but was accepted because his low class mother won a humungous lottery. Or something. The elitism is delineated rather clearly, and referred to rather too often. Even when I found myself agreeing with Gregor or someone about the phoniness of the message of Windsor Academy -- which prides itself on promoting diversity and spiritual growth. I ended up annoyed. Gregor, while clearly at wits end about his depression and boredom and ennui, is whiny and pompous and given to too many asides about the fakery of the town and the pretense of the private school. And Haddam does show well the overwhelming need for people to make everything look normal, to the point of ignoring Alice's terribly inappropriate affair, which was common knowledge for everyone at the school, including her husband. So while I tended to share the point of view of the author, the heavy-handedness of the message made me uncomfortable. I was interested in Mark, a messed up but clearly smart kid who knows something's wrong and can't figure out what -- but then no one else can, nor do they seem to care. It's drugs, it has to be drugs. That message too is over-written, with every character in the book saying "he's on drugs" five and six times -- or so it seemed. Okay, we get it. Just as someone later says "oh, he must have been playing video games" when, in fact there is no evidence whatsoever that Mark broke any school rules, including the one against game machines. In fact, Mark is not on drugs and that's the key mystery here, more than why Michael died: who is targeting Mark in a pretty horrible way, and why. The speed with which these people jump to conclusions and judgments made my head spin. It's too easy, almost to say "these people make snap judgments" and yet, it all seems to be surface and artifice and touchy-feely nonsense; no academics, no teachers who actually show a love of teaching. Too facile. When a kid goes to a school infirmary with severe strep throat and no one even looks at him, because "he's on drugs" and when the headmaster of a prep school requires people to call him before calling 911 in a medical emergency, it makes me squirm. I ended up wanting to avoid pretty much everyone in THE HEADMASTER'S WIFE. I didn't like anyone here; a common enough complaint of mine. I didn't even like Demarkian, whose intelligence would be interesting if it weren't so mired in his self-absorbed behavior. I flagged well before the resolution of the story although I stayed with the book because I wanted to know what happened to Mark and I started thinking about skipping some of the last chapters. I didn't care at all what happened to anyone else in the entire book, which is a somewhat sorry thing to say.
Reviewed by Andi Shechter, March 2005
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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