A historical horror story of not listening to girls

“Oh, patriarchy! What an insidious evil you are.”

I thought this repeatedly as I read “The Illness Lesson.” Set in 1871 Massachusetts, Clare Beams’ debut novel is part horror, part case study and — I mean this as a compliment — part feminist polemic.

The story begins when Caroline Hood and her father, Samuel Hood, find a flock of unclassified red birds pecking around town. Samuel, a man whose ego is prone to swelling, takes their arrival as a sign: that it’s time to open the Trilling Hearts School for girls.

He advertises the school with an essay and hires his protege David to teach math and Caroline to teach literature. As the students arrive, Samuel drags busts of John Milton and Plato into the barn, “imagining the girls themselves as a kind of beautiful clay: dense, rich, formless, and waiting for him.”

If the premise I’ve described sounds realistic so far, don’t be fooled. Beams is a gifted writer of “slipstream,” or that thin ice in a good story where audience expectation gives way to wellimagined plausibility.

A few months into the school term, the red birds — now called trilling hearts — are breeding, molting and building alarmingly ornate nests.

Meanwhile, strange physical ailments begin to afflict the girls: fainting spells, falls, rashes, narcolepsy. Samuel believes the girls are faking, or at least exaggerating, their maladies.

Caroline is more sympathetic, yet she was raised “believing, always, her father above herself.”

Eventually the problem, of course, grows too severe to dismiss. A doctor is called, then another named Hawkins. I’ll leave the ghastly course of Hawkins’ treatment for the reader to uncover on their own, but I will declare with relish that Samuel Hood is a true and timeless 21st century villain.

His fatal flaw is that, in the words of one of the students he fails, “he still thinks he sees more than everyone else” despite mounting contradictory evidence. Such selfregard, as many of us know, causes a man like Samuel to transgress personal boundaries. It is not that Samuel wants his students to become themselves; he wants them to become like him.

Reading “The Illness Lesson” is like watching someone with superior intelligence work out a proof. If I felt a tinge of sorrow that its characters did not necessarily sur

Doubleday Clare Beams, author of “The Illness Lesson”