The Small Room. May Sarton. 1961. I’ve heard of May Sarton for years but knew nothing about her so when this book turned up on the kindle and it was a novel set in a college I had to try it. I like novels with academic settings. Lucy Winter accepted a job to teach American Lit at a small girl’s college in New England. She was fresh out of grad school and recovering from a broken heart. She is immediately invited into a small group of faculty members who meet for cocktails. She struggles with her classes and is determined to remain aloof from the students. Then she discovers that a star student who is a protégé of a very strong opinionated faculty member has plagiarized a paper that was to be published in the school magazine. Not much suspense but the interplay between the characters interesting. There is a covert air of lesbianism throughout that might bother some readers. ( )

The Small Room is an interesting but uneven novel about life at a small women's college somewhere near Boston in the late 1950s. Lucy Winter is the recent recipient of a doctorate in English lit from Harvard, who moves to teach at Appleton College in the unhappy aftermath of a broken engagement. The plot of the novel, such as it is, centres on the fallout of a plagiarism case involving one of the college's most gifted students.

Mostly, however, Sarton is interested in the moral and ethical obligations of teachers to students and in what it means to learn. Some of the points Sarton raises are things that struck a chord with me even though I've taught at a large state school in the Midwestern US rather than at a SLAC. However, though Sarton has a gift for description, her prose and dialogue can be overly mannered—at times I felt I was reading a mid-century stage play about academia, with every performance delivered in a Mid-Atlantic accent and exaggerated so as to reach the back of the house. It didn't help that many of the characters were too thinly sketched to come across as anything more than mouthpieces for different viewpoints. ( )

I found this book at turns beautiful, at other times frustrating. It is nominally "about" a plagiarism case at a small New England women's liberal arts college in the 1950s. But the book is more a philosophical rumination on the nature of learning, personal relationships, and the moral obligations that members of an intimate learning community hold to one another.

Okay, first of all, I am a professor at a large state university in the midwest, but there was a lot about the way Sarton discussed both education and the act of teaching that resonated with me. The community I am in is not as small or insular as the one Sarton describes, and the types of students I teach are very different from the (apparently) privileged, homogeneous group Prof. Lucy Winter encounters. So my baseline is quite different--but Sarton successfully created evocative public and private moments that definitely got to the core of what it means to engage in higher education, good and bad.

However, I found the two central conflicts of the book endlessly frustrating. The plagiarism case: fine, there's a point to be made for extenuating circumstances in such a case, and it was made. But I find it inconceivable that the community could have been ripped apart so violently by this. Students cheat at things, and they always have, for a variety of reasons. Maybe we as instructors ask ourselves if our unreasonable demands led to an untenable situation in which cheating was the only option, but why in god's name would or should anyone else care so much about it? The problem was that the supporting characters were too thinly drawn (Blake, Jack and Maria, Hallie, the forgettable new professor possibly named Henry) to convincingly show me why a fairly ordinary plagiarism case would rock their very self-identity to its foundations.

The second conflict, about whether the college should put a psychiatrist on the staff, was interesting, if dated. Maybe it was scandalous or controversial at the time to suggest that students would require help from mental health professionals (the biggest scandal today is that we don't have ENOUGH mental health professionals on university staff). However, I had major problems with parts of this plot. Lucy takes the cheating student, Jane, to a psychiatrist, on her own, off campus, during a school break. This should have raised some red flags for a community that seemed SO finely-tuned to the moral implications of every sneeze. Second, apparently the psychiatrist tells this unrelated instructor who has known the patient for two months his diagnosis and how he arrived at it, and she SHARES all this information with the entire faculty. I'm sorry? And no one at the college thought to have even one conversation about the hugely problematic moral implications of these actions? I don't buy it. It seemed like a massive blind spot in a work that purported to be all about searching moral inquiries of the teacher-student relationship and its many complexities.

So that turned into kind of a rant. What I will say is that this is a short but dense novel, that there is a lot of attention to ethics and gray areas, and that it is one of the better novels I have read that paints a realistic picture of everyday classroom teaching (no "o captain, my captain!" and standing on desks here). But there were just too many threads that didn't connect for me. ( )

I have never read anything by May Sarton – except for a few short stories. When a member of my book club recommended this title, I became intrigued. I enjoy novels describing the ins and outs, ups and downs, and other antics which play out behind the scenes in academia. Sarton’s novel, A Small Room takes its place among several novels of this genre I read over the last few years.

Lucy Winter has a newly minted PhD in hand, and she takes a job at a small New England women’s college as a professor of English. The dynamic relationships in the college fascinate me the most. Among the faculty, between the faculty and the administration, and between the students and the faculty.

Carryl Cope is a veteran professor with lots of clout with the administration. She is also intimately involved with a member of the Board of Trustees who holds the purse springs of a substantial endowment in a will. Carryl also has a prize student, Jane Seamen, whom she is grooming for grad school and what promises to be a stellar academic career. Then Lucy discovers Jane has seriously plagiarized an essay for the college literary magazine. Lucy caught in the eddy of the politics – pro- and anti-Carryl, pro- and anti-Jane, and then the agitated students are thrown into the mix. Lucy handles all this with aplomb, but with a touch of trepidation since she must slide on a knife’s edge to the resolution of the situation.

The novel overflows with statements and observations most teachers have felt at one time or another – I know many of them are all too familiar to me. For example, “‘The hell of teaching is that one is never prepared. I often think that before every class I feel the same sort of terror I used to experience before an examination … and always I imagine that next year it will be different’” (28). A familiar refrain in our building at every semester’s end runs like this: “Next semester will be better!”

On her first day of class, Lucy decides to reveal something about herself to the students. She tells them, “‘You will discover,’ she added with a smile, ‘that you appreciate teachers rather a long time after you have suffered from them’” (34) I can only hope this one has a grain of truth. I know I want it to be true. Lastly, Sarton writes, “‘The relation between student and teacher must be about the most complex and ill-defined there is’” (83). I know this one to be absolutely true. Literally dozens of other examples have my pencil marks.

Another little game I played with this interesting cast of characters included matching some of Sarton’s characters with some of my colleagues. And, of course for fans of Mad Men, ubiquitous cigarettes and martinis accompany every meeting no matter the size. This quite dates the novel in the year originally published – 1961.

All in all,May Sarton's The Small Room will surely appeal to anyone who has spent some time at the head of a class. At our book club, an animated discussion lasted nearly all of the two hours allotted. I noticed that a few non-teaching members of the club were uncharacteristically silent during these discussions. Nevertheless, everyone seemed to enjoy the novel. 4 stars for so much smoking I found myself coughing as I read.

--Jim, 8/20/12 ( )