Mean girls
Private school puts cruelty on the curriculum
As any fallen politician — take your pick — will tell you, our loftiest ideals have a habit of deferring to our baser instincts. So it is with the students of Toronto’s George Eliot Academy — the elite private girls’ school that is the focus of Krista Bridge’s debut novel — who, despite having access to the finest education money can buy, never quite lose touch with their cruellest, most vituperative selves.
Fifteen-year-old Audrey Brindle has wanted to be an “Eliot girl” since the Academy opened its imposing gates a decade ago. Now, after finally passing the entrance exam — albeit barely — her longtime dream is about to become a reality. She should be overjoyed, but instead she’s terrified and unsure of herself. Audrey’s mother, Ruth, a teacher at Eliot and the driving force behind the latter’s aspirations, finds her daughter’s change of heart both frustrating and mystifying.
Audrey’s fears turn out to be well founded. Though the school’s uptight headmistress and founder, Larissa McAllister, conceived of Eliot as “a breeding ground for enlightened thinkers, that would liberate girls from the handcuffs of imitative academics — the mind-shrivelling path of learning set by men and for men,” Audrey finds it an unfriendly, forbidding place.
“Enlightened” doesn’t really fit the bill, either. When Audrey does poorly in her midterms she gets, not encouragement, but a stern reprimand and the threat of expulsion from Larissa. Later, when Audrey is accused of wrongdoing, Larissa sees her lack of moral fibre as the predictable byproduct of an inferior intellect.
Having rejected the only person willing to be her friend — another new girl, Seeta, whose overbrimming self-confidence irritates everyone — Audrey finds herself woefully isolated. Seeta, though, becomes an instant favourite with the staff, who swoon over the heartfelt renditions of old pop tunes she delivers via guitar at daily lunchtime recitals. To the collective eye-rolling this induces in her fellow students, however, Seeta is seemingly oblivious. Enter Arabella, the ringleader of a nasty little clique. Determined to take Seeta down a notch, she delegates Audrey with the task of slipping a series of poisoned pen letters into Seeta’s locker. Flattered to finally be part of anything, Audrey complies.
With her daughter’s hard-won spot at Eliot in obvious jeopardy, you’d think Ruth would be running interference at this point. Instead, she decides to create some drama of her own by embarking on an affair with the new teacher, Henry Winter, who also happens to be Arabella’s stepfather. The year isn’t given, but various clues make it clear the novel is set close to the present day. Still, much about it feels anachronistic. While the adults have cellphones, for example, the girls don’t appear to text or use social media.
More disconcertingly, Bridge has adopted a quasi-19th century writing style full of self-conscious, strained formality and verbal circumlocutions. Characters refer to books as “tomes” and “bemoan” when moaning seems called for. When the family dog wags his tail, he does it “ardently.” And even if you manage to successfully navigate the novel’s many adverbial minefields — “He knew that it was shamefully womanly to store a card photograph in his desk” — what’s left can be cringingly awkward: “Female cattiness was a knowledge into which women were born, like the formation of language.”
Many of The Eliot Girls’ problems stem from Bridge’s use of what’s sometimes called the free indirect style: third-person narration that can slide into various characters’ points of view. Here, the narrator’s tortuously filigreed language and preciousness of tone is distinctly Larissa’s, yet the novel isn’t always told from her perspective. This often creates grating incongruities.
Bridge is so preoccupied with her wordsmithing that, by the novel’s halfway point, we still don’t have what you’d call a plot. Instead, the girls continue sending vaguely unpleasant notes to Seeta (whose reaction to them is never really given). Larissa, declaring these to be the crisis of her career, resolves to find the perpetrator and bring her to justice, which doesn’t prove very difficult. Ruth continues behaving badly with Henry, but the affair fails to convince: Off-puttingly vain and pretentious, Henry mostly treats her with contempt.
Bridge’s writing can be contradictory, inconsistent. Ruth, who’s usually dressed to the nines in pencil skirts and stilettos, is shown in one scene forgetfully leaving the house in her pyjamas in the middle of the day. Larissa brags about her “progressive feminist agenda,” yet criticizes conduct she deems “unladylike.”
While the last example, in fairness, could be Bridge intentionally fingering Larissa as a hypocrite, should we really have to wonder? Far too often, the disconnects are clearly not deliberate: they’re the consequence of Bridge’s tendency to write first and think later.