Intense story aims to decipher rape culture
The loyalty of a teacher’s family is tested when he is accused
The Best Kind of People, the new novel by Zoe Whittall, veers into dark and productive territory.
The morality tale by this Toronto writer depicts the banality of rape culture and malfeasance when a sex scandal blows up in rural Connecticut.
The Best Kind of People zeroes in on an escalating family crisis when patriarch George Woodbury, an Avalon Hills prep school teacher, is jailed without bail. Woodbury is charged with sexual misconduct with four minors and attempted rape of a minor. As this shocking revelation by Woodbury’s accusers unfolds, the entire community is upended.
This third novel by the critically acclaimed urban storyteller is taut, compassionate and clever. Whittall, who also writes for television ( Degrassi, Schitt’s Creek and Baroness Von Sketch Show), has published two previous novels ( Bottle Rocket Hearts and Holding Still for As Long As Possible) and three collections of poetry.
Whittall is a gifted chronicler of urban queer culture. Bottle Rocket Hearts, her breakout debut, deftly navigated a lesbian coming-of-age story set in Montreal during the 1995 Quebec Referendum.
The Best Kind of People’s subject matter is a departure. Whittall, the 2008 Writer’s Trust of Canada’s winner of an emerging gay author grant, easily shifts gears to explore the dynamics of a straight couple’s marriage when their loyalty and commitment are tested.
Most telling is the second-generation impact of the unfolding events on their Type A, heterosexual high school-age daughter, Sadie, and adult homosexual son, Andrew, who encountered homophobia first-hand at Avalon Hills school.
Whittall does an excellent job of building up to the main question put forward in the plot: did George Woodbury do it? The suspense continues to build as locals, the media and Woodbury’s family and friends confront the charges.
George, in typical defendant posturing, insists the whole matter is a misunderstanding and it will all be cleared up in due course.
For his outraged family, the daunting scenario is a classic test of loyalty. Do his intimates side with the upright citizen, popular teacher and father or do they believe his young charges who insist they are telling the truth?
The strongest subplot in this intense narrative is the peer obstacle course Sadie must navigate when she returns to study at Avalon Hills and tries valiantly to coexist with her father’s irate accusers.
This setting is where Whittall shines. Her experience writing dialogue and plot lines for Degrassi is most evident. She depicts youth angst, addictions and delicate social interplay with acuity.
The Woodbury family’s female characters, wife Joan and daughter Sadie, are the most complex and credible. Sadie develops an inappropriate crush on her boyfriend’s mother’s paramour — and turns to the bong.
Joan, a nurse by profession, is a classic nurturer who is simultaneously nostalgic and livid. Joan dutifully visits George in jail, defends him to all critics and sagely joins a support group to cope with the emotional fallout from watching her life, her marriage and her family’s reputation all go to pieces.
The weak link in this suspenseful melodrama is George Woodbury. The fallen husband and father remains an enigma. Whittall’s use of third-person narrator only serves to widen the gap between reader and protagonist.
Perhaps Whittall wanted Woodbury to represent the abuser as everyman. Yet, even in the most lurid stories of abuse — such as the despicable Albert in Alice Walker’s classic The Color Purple — the villains are fully realized.
The aim of Whittall’s story, deciphering rape culture, is worthy. The unravelling of the upstanding Woodbury family is tragic. The adverse emotional impact of George’s choices on Joan and Sadie, in particular, unfolds naturally as the characters navigate their circumstances — as flawed human beings typically do. The women alternate between outrage and denial, distance and intimacy.
Whittall places the reader right at the centre of their pain. It’s the best depiction of female suffering I’ve read since Jane Smiley eloquently tackled sexual abuse in A Thousand Acres.
The Best Kind of People mostly lives up to its ambitious premise: Whittall sets out to imaginatively investigate what the accompanying promotional materials dub “an all-American family on the brink of collapse.”
There are is no neat closure: this contemporary morality tale has a disturbing final twist that left this reader dangling.
The Best Kind of People is the toughest kind of fiction: social realism without redemption. Patricia Dawn Robertson is an independent journalist with a double major in Women’s Studies and English from York University.