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Summary
Summary
An immensely talented writer whose work has been described as "incandescent" (Kirkus) and "poetic" (Booklist), Thomas Christopher Greene pens a haunting and deeply affecting portrait of one couple at their best and worst.
Inspired by a personal loss, Greene explores the way that tragedy and time assail one man's memories of his life and loves. Like his father before him, Arthur Winthrop is the Headmaster of Vermont's elite Lancaster School. It is the place he feels has given him his life, but is also the site of his undoing as events spiral out of his control. Found wandering naked in Central Park, he begins to tell his story to the police, but his memories collide into one another, and the true nature of things, a narrative of love, of marriage, of family and of a tragedy Arthur does not know how to address emerges. Luminous and atmospheric, bringing to life the tight-knit enclave of a quintessential New England boarding school, the novel is part mystery, part love story and an exploration of the ties of place and family. Beautifully written and compulsively readable, The Headmaster's Wife stands as a moving elegy to the power of love as an antidote to grief.
"A truly remarkable novel, I read the second half of The Headmaster's Wife with my mouth open, my jaw having dropped at the end of the first half. Thomas Christopher Greene knows how to hook a reader and land him." --Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Empire Falls
"An accomplished and artful storyteller, Greene has surprises in store as he unspools a plot that becomes as poignant as it is unpredictable." --Wally Lamb, New York Times bestselling author of The Hour I First Believed
"Greene's genre-bending novel of madness and despair evokes both the predatory lasciviousness of Nabokov's classic, Lolita , and the anxious ambiguity of Gillian Flynn's contemporary thriller, Gone Girl (2012)." -- Booklist
Author Notes
THOMAS CHRISTOPHER GREENE is the author of three previous novels: Mirror Lake , I'll Never be Long Gone , and Envious Moon . His fiction has been translated into eleven languages and has won many awards and honors. In 2007, Tom founded the Vermont College of Fine Arts, a top fine arts college, making him the youngest college president in America at that time. He lives in Montpelier, VT, with his family.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Nothing is what it appears in this brilliant story of a life gone awry, in Greene's fourth novel set in New England (after 2007's Envious Moon). Arthur Winthrop, headmaster of the Vermont-based Lancaster School, is found wandering around naked in snow-covered Central Park in New York City, and as he explains to the authorities what brought him to this disturbing situation, the reader is led to believe that the book will be the story of his ill-advised affair with a female student named Betsy Pappas. But it is actually about the trajectory of Arthur's inauspicious marriage; about Betsy, a young woman trying to improve her lot; and about Arthur's family history. Greene, founder of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, ably recreates the rarified ambience of a New England private school-the awareness of social class, the faculty politics, the deference paid to the headmaster and his family. And when it becomes clear that Winthrop's delusions run far deeper than were previously apparent, the author's true intentions make this tale even more remarkable, for the book is, at its core, a trenchant examination of one family's terrible loss and how the aftermath of tragedy can make or break a person's soul. Agent: Marly Rusoff, Marly Rusoff & Associates. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
A man found running naked in Central Park is unusual, even by jaded New York City standards. But when that man turns out to be Arthur Winthrop, respected headmaster of Vermont's venerable Lancaster private boarding school, the event becomes noteworthy. It morphs into the surreal when Arthur eagerly confesses to police interrogators that he has just murdered one of his students, Betsy Pappas, with whom he had been conducting a torrid, if unrequited, affair. The problem with Arthur's story, however, is that his victim is very much alive. She no longer goes by the name Betsy Pappas, having relinquished it when she married Arthur soon after their college graduation. Arthur's unreliable memories of their life together fuel the sordid tale he unveils, though Elizabeth's recollection of their doomed marriage sheds an equally unflattering light on a relationship defined by jealousy, deception, and regret. Greene's genre-bending novel of madness and despair evokes both the predatory lasciviousness of Nabokov's classic, Lolita, and the anxious ambiguity of Gillian Flynn's contemporary thriller, Gone Girl (2012).--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2014 Booklist
Kirkus Review
A headmaster and his wife suffer intimations of mortality on a bucolic Vermont campus. The first half of Greene's fourth novel (Envious Moon, 2007, etc.) unfolds like a conventional academic tale. The third generation head of Lancaster, an exclusive Vermont prep school, Arthur Winthrop (his father, the former head, still lives on campus) leads an orderly life, except for occasional brushes with imperious board members whose New England pedigrees are even more elite than his own. However, Arthur's marriage to Elizabeth (the couple is in their late 50s) has long since deteriorated into strained conversations and separate bedrooms. The couple was driven further apart when their only son, Ethan, opted for service in Iraq instead of college. Since Ethan's departure, Elizabeth finds solace only in obsessive tennis playing. Arthur's obsession is a student, 18-year-old Betsy Pappas, whose unconventional beauty, but most of all youth, fascinates him. He lures her to Boston on a pretext and seduces her. However, she soon tires of what she considers a training exercise with an older man and tries to disengage by dating a star basketball player, Russell Hurley, who attends Lancaster on scholarship. Arthur first tries to blackmail Betsy into continuing their affair by hiding alcohol under Russell's dorm bed but then, somewhat arbitrarily, allows disciplinary matters to take their course. Russell is expelled, and his one chance of breaking out of the working class and into the Ivy League has been dashed. Italicized interludes throughout reveal that Arthur has been picked up by NYC police after being found wandering naked in Central Park. Just as we begin to understand that this is no ordinary interrogation, the novel takes a wholly unexpected twist, which is then compounded by another, even more surprising one. Up to this point, readers will suspect only that the story could be taking place anytime in the last 40 years or so. Although the puzzle element threatens to overwhelm the narrative, this is a moving testament to the vicissitudes of love and loss, regret and hope.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Greene (Mirror Lake; Envious Moon) has created a brilliant, harrowing novel depicting the spectacular unraveling of a once distinguished and proudly successful man. He has also conceived one of the most convincingly drawn unreliable narrators that readers may ever meet, a character recalling the creations of Edgar Allan Poe. It is nearly halfway through the novel before we begin to understand that our storyteller, Arthur Winthrop, the headmaster of the elite Lancaster School in Vermont, is delusional and psychotic-and has suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown. A number of events trigger this collapse, including the loss of his son in the Iraq war and the heavy drinking that follows this tragedy. Also crucial to this breakdown is an old crime that haunts Arthur, one he committed at Lancaster as a student many years ago with the help of his father, the previous headmaster, and which involved the boyfriend of an ex-girlfriend of Arthur's. -VERDICT This is a riveting psychological novel about loss and the terrible mistakes and compromises one can make in love and marriage. Essential for fans of literary fiction.-Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
ACRIMONY He arrives at the park by walking down Central Park West and then entering through the opening at West Seventy-seventh Street. This is in the winter. It is early morning, and the sun is little more than an orangey haze behind heavy clouds in the east. Light snow flurries fill the air. There are not many people out, a few runners and women bundled against the cold pushing strollers. He walks down the asphalt drive and when he reaches a path with a small wooden footbridge he stops for a moment, and it is there somewhere, a snatch of memory, but he cannot reach it. An elderly couple comes toward him, out for their morning walk. The man gives him a hearty good morning but he looks right through him. What is it he remembers? It is something beautiful, he is sure of it, but it eludes him like so many things seem to do nowadays. If he could access it, what he would see was a day twenty years earlier, in this same spot. Though it was not winter, but a bright fall day, the maples bleeding red, and he is not alone. Elizabeth is here, as is his son, Ethan. They had gone to the museum and then had lunch before coming into the park. Ethan's first trip to New York, and he is five, and though he loved the museum with its giant dinosaur skeletons, it is the park that draws his attention. The day could not be more glorious. Seasonably warm and without a cloud in the sky: a magical Manhattan day. Ethan runs ahead of them on the path. His wife takes his arm, leans into him. He looks down and smiles at her. They don't need to speak, for they are both drinking in the moment, the day, the happiness of their boy, and the gift of this experience. There is no reason to give it words. Ethan finds a gnarled tree on the side of the path, one that grows horizontally just a foot or so above the ground. He immediately climbs up on top of it, shimmying his little body over its trunk, and the two of them sit on a bench a few feet away and watch him. A couple of times they suggest they should keep walking, but the boy will not have it. He has found a tree perfectly suited for him and he demands in the way that children do that he be watched, admired, and studied as he climbs it one way, then the other. And this is okay, for they are in no rush. It is a small moment, but a perfect one. The child is right: Where else would they rather be? What could be more complete? Now, standing on the same path, with the snow picking up and falling more steadily around him, he gives up trying to find this memory and instead focuses on the snow, tracing individual flakes as they come in front of his field of vision and then disappear. He is alone suddenly. There is no one walking in either direction. The park is his. He takes off his hat and places it on the ground. Then he removes his jacket. Next he undoes his tie and then his shirt and his undershirt. Soon he is naked, and he sets off again, leaving his clothes in a neat pile on the path, and he moves up and over the hilly terrain, his eyes straight ahead, oblivious to the people who gasp when they come around a corner to find him marching toward them. All that matters to him is the feel of his bare feet crunching wonderfully on the crusty snow beneath him. " Why don't you tell us what happened?" "What happened?" "Yes." "Where should I start?" "Where do you want to start?" He looks at the men sitting across from him. It is a stupid question, he thinks. He says, "At the beginning, of course." "That would be helpful," says the man who does all the talking. "Why do you care?" "What do you mean?" "I mean, why do you care? Just as it sounds." He was growing exasperated. "What am I to you?" "Sir, do we need to refresh you on how we found you?" "I was in the park." One of the men laughs. The other one silences him with his hand. "Yes, you were in the park. Naked. Twenty-degree weather. Snow on the ground. Walking in Central Park naked." "Is that a crime?" "Yes. It is, in fact." "In Vermont it's not." "Seriously?" "Yes. You can be naked. You just can't be obscene." "What's the difference?" He sighs. He looks down at his clothes. They are too big for him. He is practically swimming in these damn clothes. "Do I have to answer that?" "No." "Good. Because that will tire me." "Just start, then." "Okay," he says. "But I want some coffee. Strong coffee. Black." The man nods. "We'll get that for you. Begin." He leans forward. "The beginning," he says. "This is how it starts." Copyright © 2014 by Thomas Christopher Greene Excerpted from The Headmaster's Wife by Thomas Christopher Greene All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
