Hardy stuff Lily King can't quite bring the past to life BY JOHN FREEMAN
	THE ENGLISH TEACHER By Lily King | New York: Grove | $23 | 242 pages | Lily King is at the Portland Public Library | Wednesday, Oct 19 | 207.871.1700

It’s hard to imagine what Thomas Hardy would write about today. The social observations of his thickly brocaded novels have become the province of journalism; his psychological insights into the inner lives of women now find currency in women’s magazines, from actual females. Were Tess of D’Urbervilles alive in 2005, she’d probably write an essay for Glamour about how she was starting over again, after all those bad men.

Perhaps this is why The English Teacher, Lily King’s dutiful riff on Hardy’s 1891 masterpiece feels so static, so doubly antiquated. By turns painful and heart-breaking, the book tells the story of one woman’s delayed response to a rape she suffered almost 20 years ago. In Hardy’s era, there was no monolithic culture of revelation encouraging novelists to name or even diagnosis such a condition; it was simply the human condition, and a particular dire one at all. Not so today.

As a result, The English Teacher labors under a terrible burden of the unspoken. Spend five pages with Vida Avery, the book’s high-strung and rigidly un-humorous heroine, and it is clear something awful has clamped its fist over her capacity for joy. As the story begins, Vida grimly agrees to marry Tom Belou, a widower and colleague at nearby Fayer Academy, even though every cell of her body tells her to say no. Needless to say, the two do not consummate their marriage on wedding night.

At first it seems Vida has made this bargain for the sake of her son Peter, an awkward 15-year-old who is also a student in her 10th grade English class. The book of the moment is, of course, Tess of D’Urbervilles, which Vida pries open with a close reading so literal she might as well be using a sledgehammer.

" ‘Why would someone say that Tess is so pretty her mother should mind she doesn’t get green malt on the floor?’ " Let’s just say it and be done with it, [Vida] thought. But they kept their heads down into their chests like sleeping pigeons. "What would make people in the late nineteenth century worry about a 16-year-old girl with a mouth like a peony? What was the one thing that could ruin her?’ "

Although Peter hasn’t a clue what his mother is telegraphing to him, most readers will know: Like Tess, Vida has known the shame of sexual humiliation, but she will be damned if she goes about sharing it with the world. This might be the year 1979, and feminist liberation a force to be reckoned with, but Vida is hostage to her pride (and her shame) and she will soldier on alone.

And so she builds a wall of prickliness around her that grows thicker with every scene. When Tom brings her into his home and encourages their families to mingle, Vida begins drinking at night and lecturing his son Stuart about religion. When Peter starts making friends and adapting to their new life, Vida drifts further and further away — as if hell-bent on duplicating Tess’s fate: abused by one man, forsaken by another.

Vida’s hectoring references to Hardy just about drives this novel onto the shoals of the obvious, but at the last moment Peter grabs the rudder and steers it back towards complexity. He couldn’t care less what his mother’s cherished authors says about life, he merely wants to live it — and fittingly when Vida finally goes entirely off the rails he is the one who swoops in and rescues her.

This is delicate and painfully overworked territory that King has staked out here, and she deserves some credit for trying to make a novel from it. King also seems to understand the way families have become the new determining force of social order. Vida may not feel the stigma of her single-parenthood at school, but she cannot help but sense the wariness inside the Belou household — which is still reeling from the death of Tom’s first wife.

Just when you think that King has found a footpath through this minefield of hallmark clichés, however, she trips the wire and off goes a sentence like, "It was all about courage. To live even a day on this life required courage." Throughout the novel, there is also a preponderance of shuddering that occurs on the verge of sexual contact, as if this were not heavy petting but outdoor nookie in the cold.

Perhaps these are tips of her quill to Hardy, but they feel micromanage-y, like King can’t help but cram the theme home in case we’ve been snoozing through the lecture like some jock in the back of her classroom. This is a shame, since the only way for a novel to work is for its author to trust, from the beginning, that her performance alone will transport us. Even if it is to a place as sad and dark as this novel bravely tries to take us.

John Freeman can be reached at jfreeman4@nyc.rr.com