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Summary
Summary
Benjamin arrives with his parents for a tour of Roaring Orchards, a therapeutic boarding school tucked away in upstate New York. Suddenly, his parents are gone and Benjamin learns that he is there to stay. 16 years old, a two-time failed suicide attempter, Benjamin must navigate his way through a new world of morning meds, popped privileges, candour meetings' and cartoon brunches - all run by adults who themselves have yet to really come of age. More and more, Benjamin thinks about running away - but he needs to know just who he would be leaving behind.'
Author Notes
Dan Josefson has received a Fulbright research grant and a Schaeffer Award from the International Institute of Modern Letters. He has an MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He lives in Brooklyn, and works at a book club for children's literature.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Roaring Orchards, a boarding school in upstate New York for troubled teens, is the setting of Josefson's debut novel, which is full of characters (both students and teachers), groups (Alternative Girls; Regular Kids), rules, and schedules. Josefson offers a map with every Roaring Orchards building labeled, a specific, defined (and confined) geography. He's created a microcosm, led by the idiosyncratic Aubrey, a kid with severe unspecified health and psychological problems who thrives on creating rules and bizarre special designations, and shepherds offbeat therapeutic activities like "psychic mending," in which participants play a variety of individuals in a student's life. Combine leader Aubrey with the rural microcosm and the feeling that those in charge are just as crazy as the individuals they're in charge of, and it's hard not to think of Animal Farm. Josefson writes with a similar ironic detachment to Orwell's parable, but there's no sense of authorial omniscience, just precise, detailed descriptions. Given the emotional issues of the students (and to a lesser extent the teachers), Josefson's cool, measured prose at first comes as a surprise. But it soon becomes clear that the students-Lauren, who regularly cuts herself; Tidbit, who takes all varieties of dangerous drugs; sometimes narrator Benjamin, who has multiple suicide attempts in his past-are all emotionally disconnected from their inner turbulence and the style makes sense. A promising if not fully realized effort. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The Roaring Orchards School for Troubled Teens in upstate New York is a troubled institution. Its founder and headmaster, Aubrey, resembles a cult leader, and while he insists that teens need structure and limits, interpreting his rules isn't easy; the struggle to win privileges often pits the students against one another. Anchored by the slowly growing friendship between students Benjamin and Tidbit (aka Sarah), the story is told by Benjamin, in recollection, informed by what he says others told him, so it becomes both a first-person narrative and an ensemble piece (there are many scenes in which Benjamin is not present). This is not your usual coming-of-age tale. Aubrey's arcane, arbitrary form of therapy (the book's title comes from his list of seven approved feelings) and its attendant vocabulary evoke George Saunders' eye for the absurdity of bureaucracy and his ear for jargon, too. There are also strong echoes of Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. But despite the dark humor, Josefson humanizes his characters beautifully. Their longing to connect, and their confusion at where they find themselves students and faculty alike is urgently palpable. The prose is matter-of-fact, even placid, and studded with perfectly phrased gems, a cool surface to a work that is rich in feeling. A wonderful and noteworthy debut.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"THAT'S NOT A FEELING," Dan Josefson's mordant, cockeyed first novel about a boarding school in upstate New York, includes, as many fantasy novels also do, a handdrawn map of his invented world. Downhill from the gym, we see, is the ski-lodgelike cafetorium, which sits just behind the converted mansion used as an administrative building, itself uphill from a swath of pine trees known as "the Enchanted Forest." Josefson could have reasonably included a glossary as well, as his Roaring Orchards School for Troubled Teens comes equipped with its own abstruse vocabulary. Students are classified, almost like Grammy Award nominees, as Alternative, New or Regular. Teachers do not restrain students; they "wiggle" them. Yummies are forbidden, and fibs must be turned in; students who break these rules can be sheeted, skirted, cornered, ghosted or roomed, or have their furniture popped. That the school is coeducational has no relation to its bane of "intimacy blockers." Our guide to Roaring Orchards is 16-year-old Benjamin, whose parents have deposited him at the school after two suicide attempts. What led to those attempts is left unexplored, for Benjamin's attention is mostly directed outward: at his fellow students, especially a girl nicknamed Tidbit whose troubledness derives from what she calls her "self-afflicting personality"; at his teachers, who amuse themselves by forecasting which students' futures will involve serial killings; and at Aubrey, the school's founder and headmaster, a grandiose, scarf-wearing figure who's prone to baroque speeches and who seems, unlike Benjamin, pathologically incapable of separating his interior and exterior selves. (An address to his students includes an anecdote about falling asleep on the toilet.) Just how Benjamin distributes his attention is worth noting. Josefson attempts a natty narrative trick by toggling between first-person and third-person omniscient narrative modes, so that after Benjamin recounts a scene of his own he immediately switches to accounts of concurrent (and thereby unwitnessed) events, with fullaccess passes to every character's psyche. We're with Aubrey, for example, in a session with his therapist, and alone with a teenage girl cutting her legs with a razor blade. "My story here ... is based on what I saw and what I was told, by students and occasionally by members of the faculty," goes Benjamin's Woodward-ish explanation, but the shifting layers of unreliability can make for slippery, unsteady reading. It's a self-afflicting narrative style. Josefson's deft, tempered prose style, however, supplies a measure of traction. It's unornamented but never flat or blunted, so that the characters, not the sentences, heat the pages. Aubrey and Tidbit provide the most heat, albeit radioactive, and the novel attains a particularly sublime warmth when Tidbit and Benjamin engineer an escape from the school that involves sinking a rowboat in the middle of a nearby lake. The philosophy at Roaring Orchards, which Aubrey calls an "enormous psychic mending workshop," is based on strict routine, and the novel's plot reflects that. Propulsion comes from fissures in the routine, from aberrations - escapes, mild episodes of violence, the comings and goings of new students and faculty members, a mysterious deterioration in Aubrey's health, an allegedly remedial "ReBirthing session" that goes horribly wrong. In between there's the constant untangling of the school's rules and lexicon, exercises in absurdity during which Josefson tosses satirical darts at the (admittedly wide) target of psychobabble and therapeutic jargon. "Can you be sheeted and skirted at the same time?" one student asks, not unprofoundly. Embedded in that question is a deeper one: how to survive in a capricious world, how to push back against institutionalized irrationality. Boardingschool novels are invariably allegorical, and "That's Not a Feeling" is no different; the absurdity of Roaring Orchards is the absurdity of life, compressed onto several rural acres. As Benjamin says at one point: "I couldn't hold all the pieces of it in my head at once." Jonathan Miles is the author of a novel, "Dear American Airlines." His next novel, "Want Not," will be published in 2013.
Kirkus Review
Most of the goings-on at Roaring Orchards School in upstate New York are not academic but instead personal and chaotic. Josefson uses Benjamin, a new student at the school, as an intermittent narrator, though he also narrates events he couldn't possibly have witnessed, so while we get his perspective on incidents at the school, we get a broader view as well. With two failed suicide attempts behind him, Benjamin has been placed in school by his parents, who drop him off and disappear--his first hint that life will start to be very different indeed. At Roaring Orchards he meets a plenitude of bent and broken students, most notably Tidbit, a buxom girl who's attracted to most every drug. The most normative response that students have to the school is running away, and it seems as if they're always being chased down and brought back against their will. The founder and headmaster of the school is Aubrey, who one day had an epiphany that students engaging in questionable behavior should not be expelled, and he found an eager cadre of parents who bought into this philosophy, for he was able to expand the school impressively after he put this policy into effect. Because it's a school for "troubled teens," Aubrey has instituted a number of strategies, many of them involving therapy but most of them questionable--like having students relive birth trauma, for example, or placing them in "alternative" dorms to isolate them for untoward behavior. We eventually find out that Benjamin is narrating these events of his adolescence from an adult perspective, and his visit to Roaring Orchards after Aubrey's death and the school's demise is particularly poignant. Josefson writes vigorously and is well attuned to the upheavals experienced by adolescents.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Josefson's debut is an odd, engaging, and, eventually, fulfilling coming-of-age story that takes a little getting used to. Sixteen-year-old Benjamin and the third-person narrator with whom he shares storytelling duties speak in the invented vocabulary of the Roaring Orchard School for Troubled Teens, where Benjamin has been sent after two suicide attempts. Ably voiced by veteran narrator Charles Carroll, this satire could have easily bogged down in mordant, postmodern foolishness. Instead, Josefson breathes compassionate life into the absurdities of existence at Roaring Orchards. Verdict Recommended for all adult readers. ["Funny at times, and more than a little sad, the book's form perfectly mirrors Benjamin's profound sense of dislocation and uncertainty. This is a powerful, haunting look at the alternate universe of an unusual therapeutic community," read the starred review of the Soho Pr. pb, LJ 7/12.-Ed.]-Wendy Galgan, St. Francis Coll., Brooklyn (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Prologue Upsate New York, late August No one noticed the evening's approach until the long shadows cast by the mountains began to merge in the grass. Alternative Boys stood on the Dirt Pile, digging away at it with their shovels and tossing the dirt toward the adjacent woods. Only when Roger woke to the growing darkness did he order the boys down and tell them to hurry back to the Mansion for supper. I'm losing it, he thought, and rubbed his face with his hands. He followed as the boys crossed Route 294 in a clump and then stretched out into a loose line to pass through the school's iron gate. The gate hung between two stone pillars; on the right pillar a sign read, THE ROARING ORCHARDS SCHOOL FOR TROUBLED TEENS, WEBITUCK, NY. The Mansion they headed toward was built on a slight eminence, and sat in an angle of light. Most of the boys rested the shovels on their shoulders or dragged them rasping along the gravel driveway. William Kay and Andrew Pudding soon fell behind; they were swinging their shovels at each other like swords. They walked face to face, Pudding shuffling backwards up the drive, William laughing wildly as the heavy wooden handles met overhead with dull clacks. Roger was glad the two of them rarely had energy for anything other than this sort of idiocy. Pudding was short and solidly built, with a round, babyish head. William was skinny and mean. If they set their minds to it, they could do plenty of damage. It was the time of evening when everything recedes into its outline, when it feels as though there's more than enough time and space for every conceivable thing to happen. Roger called for William and Pudding to quit playing and hurry up. He told the boys in front to wait for their dormmates. But his voice died on the air and no one was listening. Alternative Boys rounded the curve beneath the weeping beeches at the top of the drive. In front of them stood the Mansion, an enormous white farmhouse augmented by a jumble of disconsonant additions. Before the boys could reassemble to climb the steps together, Roger called out, "Freeze." They stopped where they were. "Hands out, gentlemen." Alternative boys dropped their shovels and held their arms out straight, each trying to reach the boy closest to him without moving his feet. They wiggled their fingers and stretched. The boys in front were close enough to form a jagged line that connected them all. William and Pudding could reach each other but were separated from the rest of the dorm. "You've drifted," Roger said. "Hold hands." Leaving their shovels where they lay, Alternative Boys formed a circle and all held hands. The sun had tipped further back behind the hills and an orange band of sunset light, followed by shadow, slid up the trunks and lower branches of the trees until only the highest leaves held light any longer. "Now," Roger said, "what's going on with you guys that you can't stay grouped?" The boys rolled bits of gravel under the soles of their sneakers or stared over the heads of the boys on the opposite side of the circle. Eric Gold was visibly upset. He had thick eyebrows and a wide, flat nose, and in the week and a half he'd been at the school, hadn't made any friends. "This is bullshit," he shouted. "You can't hand-hold me. You don't even know me." The other boys found this very funny, but those on either side of Eric tightened their grips to keep him from doing anything that would get them into more trouble. Roger cleared his throat. "I know that if you're letting your dormmates fall behind, you're either not paying attention to them or you're not willing to confront them. That's all I need to know." Roger adjusted his hat, a green felt cowboy hat, and scratched at his beard. "Has anyone explained the idea behind grouping to you? William, could you tell Eric what group stands for?" "Goats remember only…" William began. Roger sighed. "Pudding? Want to help your friend?" Pudding looked at William and back at Roger. "Gee, I recently… ordered…" "Pudding," Roger said. "..underpants…" The other boys reacted with embarrassed silence. "I'm not hearing anything," Roger said, "to convince me that if I were to un-hand-hold the dorm right now I wouldn't get taken advantage of again." The pink, gilded clouds of the reflected sunset faded in the picture windows of the Mansion. Shadows had risen from the valley floor to where the boys stood; the sparse woods darkened. "Han," Roger asked, "could you please help us out?" Han Quek hesitated, unsure of which would be worse: spending more time holding hands in a circle or playing along with Roger. He decided quickly. "Genuine relationships occur in uncomfortable proximity." "Thank you. You see, Eric? This isn't about punishing anyone. It's about bringing the group closer together. And when you're out of arms' distance, when you drift, you're denying real intimacy by fleeing togetherness. So Pudding, why were you having such a tough time being close to the people in the dorm today? Why are you and William isolating?" "I wasn't isolating," William said. "I was genuinely trying to hit him with my shovel. Genuinely ." William's pale skin and blond hair looked even lighter in the darkness. Pudding laughed and tried to kick William, but they were holding hands and Pudding couldn't turn to kick him properly. "No, really," William said. "Is there anyone here who doesn't think Pudding ought to get hit with a shovel? Raise your hand." Holding hands, no one could. "See? Pudding's the only one who doesn't think he should get hit. He's the one isolating. You should ask him why he's isolating." "I did," Roger said. The clouds were melting away into the dark, but Roger was willing to wait. He believed in following the school's process, which could take time. He was calm, and prepared to be completely rational, and if necessary, thoroughly unreasonable. Pudding said that he hadn't seen the other boys getting ahead of him because he was walking backwards, and as Roger began describing the difference between an explanation and an excuse, someone flipped a light switch inside the Mansion. The picture window in front of Alternative Boys ceased reflecting the shreds of sunset and opened now onto the Meditation Room. It hovered above the boys like a lit stage. Frances, one of the school's therapists, had entered the room with Nancy Ormsbee, a student in New Girls. The boys watched Nancy and Frances sit down in the oversized wicker armchairs beside the glass-topped table. All of a sudden it felt late. The day was lost and the boys sensed there was no time left for anything. They would hurry to change for a late dinner of cold cuts and corn chips and caffeine-free store-brand soda, and go to bed. It was one of the last days of Summer Session and every dorm was on retreat. Roger didn't like that Alternative Boys could see Nancy at therapy. She had only been enrolled three days ago and had already run away once; the police brought her back. Roger allowed the dorm to be un-hand-held. They returned their shovels to the Mansion basement, then went upstairs where they changed from work clothes to school dress and waited their turn for dinner. Bit by bit, darkness seeped into the corners of the valley. The birds that had spent the evening flitting from branch to branch flew deeper into the woods to sleep. One at a time the dorms walked to the back of the Cafetorium to pick up dinner trays, then brought these back to their quarters in the Mansion. Regular Kids, Alternative Girls, Alternative Boys, New Girls. When they were all back inside, New Boys exited the Cottage where they lived, got their food, and returned. Later, lights around campus were turned off one by one until only the windows in the upper floors of the Mansion were lighted. Then these too went out, one after another down the hallways as dorm parents entered each room to administer nighttime meds and say good night. Finally the floodlights illuminating the front of the Mansion were the only lights left on. The valley was quiet. Deer stalked windfall apples in the orchard on the east side of the Mansion. Their heavy lips slid over the apples and they broke the cool skins with their teeth. These were crab apples, small and sour, but there were too many deer in the valley, even in late summer when their numbers had been thinned by trucks hurtling down the Interstate; they ate what they could. The deer stopped and looked nervously over their shoulders. They froze not at any sound but at an intensification of the silence that pealed like a bell. On less quiet nights, the wind racing down the hills would rattle the Mansion's dusty window screens and whistle in the branches of the trees. But tonight the sky weighed down directly on the valley and on the school in its center. The students were left awake, their visions curling in on themselves like fiddleheads. Voicelessly they went through the same exhausted speeches that they recited on other sleepless nights: the monologues to their parents about all the reasons it had been a mistake to send them to the school; the rants they would let loose on Aubrey if they could get away with it; or just the stories they would tell with studied indifference, collapsing onto an old couch in a friend's basement, about what a fucked-up place it was they had just escaped. We moved our lips through these febrile daydreams and could not sleep. We were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old, although there was a tired joke at the school that Aubrey would accept a six-year-old as long as someone paid his tuition. Maybe I shouldn't say "we" quite yet--the day I'm describing is the day before I arrived at Roaring Orchards. My story here and in what follows is based on what I saw and what I was told, by students and occasionally by members of the faculty. Students and faculty had very different experiences of the school, but we had one thing in common: we would all rather have been somewhere else. But we stayed, or many of us did, most of the time. We all stay except for those who don't, as Aubrey sometimes said. Nancy Ormsbee was one of those who didn't stay. In her top bunk in her room in New Girls, she inched toward the edge of her mattress, freezing at each squeak of the metal springs. She climbed over the footboard, lowered herself off the bed. Nancy crawled across the carpet and braced herself against the wall beside the door. Then, as she had done earlier that week, she gently slid the plastic mattress, on which her roommate Laurel slept, away from the door inch by inch, taking time between each little push to let Laurel readjust in her sleep. When there was just enough room, Nancy turned the doorknob until she felt the spindle pull the latch from the post. She opened the door and squeezed out, keeping the knob turned and only letting it spring back when she had carefully pulled the door shut on the girls asleep in their room. She stole a pair of sneakers from Alternate Girls and slipped out of the Mansion into the dark. Nancy took a deep breath and sprinted across the lawn to where the school vans were parked beside the gym. She opened the back doors of the newest looking one and felt around in the dark for the jack. With it she returned, her hands shaking with adrenaline, to the Mansion. New Girls' med closet was a room off their lounge. Nancy set the jack beneath the doorknob and worked the lever. She winced at the sound of wood cracking and held still. She didn't seem to have woken anyone. She pumped the jack again and the knob bent, the metal growing paler while the old wooden door gave way. When the bolt cracked loose, Nancy entered and quickly went through the girls' allowance envelopes, taking the money saved in each. She was about to leave when she turned back and grabbed the packet with the next morning's meds. She ran back downstairs and outside. Before she disappeared from Roaring Orchards, Nancy took one last look back at the Mansion. The floodlights in the flowerbeds lit the building but distorted it as well. The eaves and the gingerbreading above the entrance cast magnified shadows over the white façade. It reminded her of a person holding a flashlight under his chin in the dark. And then she left the school forever. The Mansion sat in the center of the valley, surrounded by trees unstirred by any wind. The moon had risen, alone in the dark sky but for the haze around it. They were a pair, the moon alone in the sky, the Mansion alone in the valley, each snug in its socket like an eye and a tooth. Excerpted from That's Not a Feeling by Dan Josefson 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.
