The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton

“The template always preceded the reality, the experience, the personal truth of a thing. I learned
about love from the cinema, and from television, and from the stage. I learned the formula and
then I applied it. That’s how it happened for me. My whole life.”

Lights up, microphones on, stage set. For the characters in The Rehearsal, every opportunity becomes a chance to act, react, invent, and destroy. Eleanor Catton’s debut novel focuses on the gossipy shock waves that rock elite private school Abbey Grange after an affair is unearthed between a teacher, Mr. Saladin, and an underage teenage girl, Victoria. Interestingly, Catton never examines the psychology of the affair’s participants, choosing instead to focus on the reactions of Victoria’s sister, Isolde, and their group of friends at Abbey Grange. A sub-plot also examines the inner workings of a highly exclusive performing arts academy, and one young actor’s observation of the scandal.

An unnamed saxophone teacher forms the observational backbone of the story, allowing the reader access to her own opinions about the girls’ behavior. She berates and adores her pupils, and seems to treat their private lessons as a chance for confession and absolution. Like the powerfully helpless narrator in Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal, the observer on the periphery of scandal is often just as interesting as the participants. Catton delves into the female psyche brilliantly, drawing out revelations and ruminations from Isolde and the Abbey Grange girls that are achingly heartfelt, darkly comic, and brutally honest. Catton’s treatment of the secondary adults in the story, from the drama deans to the inept school counselor, is contrastingly, yet necessarily, one-dimensional. Although The Rehearsal is by no means a young adult or teen novel, Catton’s voice is at its best when dealing with her adolescent subjects. She perfectly captures that in-between time of adolescence, when put-upon aloofness is an acquired and necessary skill.

Catton’s skill with dialogue is most impressive, especially when it would have been too easy to slip into a slang-heavy teenage dialect. From Isolde’s explanation to her saxophone teacher about why she hasn’t had time to practice lately:

“I went to play some scales or whatever before school, but when I started playing she was all like Can’t you at least be sensitive? And ran out of the room with this fake sob noise which I knew was fake because if she was really crying she wouldn’t have run off, she would have wanted me to see.” Isolde digs the heel of her kilt pin into her knee.

“They’re treating her like a fucking artifact.”

In the constant battle between the private and the performed throughout the novel, many of the major characters’ lines seem overly theatric. The reader is forced to ask, “Did she really say that to her teacher?” “Would she really have said that to her student?” The unnamed saxophone teacher gets most of the best passages, mini-monologues that would seem perfectly at home
on the stage, yet seem oddly personal between characters.

From the saxophone teacher’s conversation with the worried mother of a prospective pupil:

“Can I tell you what the problem is?” says the saxophone teacher in a special quiet honey voice. “I think you feel a little bit as if that horrible man up at the school, that vile and disgusting man, has left a big fat fingerprint on your glasses, and it doesn’t matter what you’re looking at, all you see is his fingers.” She stands up to pace. “I know you wanted your daughter to find out about it in the ordinary way. You wanted her to find out behind the bike sheds, or underneath the bleachers on the rugby field, or in Social Studies, the facts written on the whiteboard with a felt- tipped pen. You wanted her to sneak glances at magazines and movies she wasn’t allowed to see. You wanted her to start off with some sort of blind sticky grope in her mate’s front room while her friends are outside being sick into flowerpots. That might happen more than once. It might become a phase. But you’d be prepared for it.”

The novel is peppered with stage directions, seamlessly integrated into the text. At times, it becomes hard to tell whether we are seeing the true events, a character’s private recollection, or a staged, practiced, public version of the same events. As Isolde tells her saxophone teacher about how her parents revealed the affair between Victoria and Mr. Saladin:

“He says, your mother thinks that I shouldn’t tell you this just yet, but your sister has been abused by one of the teachers at school.” She darts a look at the saxophone teacher now, quickly, then looks away. “And then he says ‘sexually,’ just to clarify, in case I thought the teacher had yelled at her at a traffic light or something.” The overhead lights have dimmed and she is lit only by a pale, flicking blue, a frosty sparkle like the on-off glow of a TV screen. The saxophone teacher is thrust into shadow so half of her face is iron gray and the other half is pale and glinting.”

The boundaries between performance and practice, public and private blur deliriously towards the end of the novel, forcing the reader to reevaluate what they’ve put into place. What has been presented as reality gains a celluloid glow, and what seemed so obviously staged appears true. The Rehearsal wavers at times from a chronological storytelling perspective, but some of the
best performances do the same.
The Rehearsal is an immersing read, and an especially nostalgic one for this former band and theatre nerd. Catton’s teenaged characters never seem overdrawn or stereotyped, and the secondary adult characters only magnify the depth of the adolescent subjects. Catton’s commitment to the observer on the edge of notoriety is extraordinary, and she treats her readers with the same respect.

Reviewed by Stephanie Turza

The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton
Reagan Arthur Books, 2010
Cloth, 320 pp, $23.99
ISBN-13: 9780316074339