8.30.2011. New York: Europa Editions. 336 pages.

Lede 1: “What happens when you take the teacher-savior—that misguided Hollywood chestnut—and make him or her into a damaged person?”^[1] Lede 2: “In You Deserve Nothing, Alexander Maksik gives something close to the most sympathetic possible take on the old story of the teacher philanderer.”^[2] It is a testament to the literariness (in a positive connotation) of Alexander Maksik’s debut novel that I could have run with either lede and made a credible case for either; which shows You Deserve Nothing is not just a provocative novel, but also a morally complex one which merits multiple readings, and a well-paced one you can jog through on your first.

Another indication of the depth is when a summary of the plot gives no adequate idea it’s effect: the writer is using painterly strokes to convey the truths (plural) which explain the truth (the plot proper of the book). As for the latter: At a high school for American expatriate brats in Paris, 33-year-old William Silver is an amalgam of teacher tropes: the popular one who kids chat up in the halls and call “Silver” and “Mr. S,” the savior with his gift of inspiring rhetoric^[3], the renegade who clashes with the stodgy administration, and the bohemian who wants to free students from the authority structures, quaint taboos, and moral emptiness of the conventional classroom.^[4] Silver’s approach of openly flouting the school rules—you can leave the class with no consequences, you can toe the line of proselytizing atheism—seems a little too bohemian (from the perspective of this [admittedly unsuccessful] former teacher) to seem plausible. (There is a scene in which an administrator remonstrates Silver, saying do you really think you should be questioning God? To which Silver responds with the classic, It’s English class, dammit! You should question everything! In real life, the conversation wouldn’t even be discussed in those terms; assuming the expat school is a public school, they would have told him neutrality regarding religion is settled law, and to back the hell away before the school incurs a lawsuit and has to fire him—forget about sleeping with a student, that mess would be just as big.)

Putting aside these quibbles with the verisimilitude of Silver’s teaching, he is a compelling figure both because he is this charismatic presence with a bohemian’s taste for teaching Sartre and Camus, but also because he has a dark side: He’s secretly a damaged person, following the death of both of his parents in quick succession and a subsequent separation from his wife (the details of all of which are kept murky and in the background by our author), but we continually see Silver in close proximity to Mia, a perfectly amiable fellow teacher who (the story strongly suggests) Silver should shack up with, would become romantically involved with—he could even shack up with the random scooter lady who smiles at him on pg. 31, which gives an idea of the sorts of hints Maksik is dropping—and he would do those things, if he was emotionally healthy. But he’s not, and he doesn’t.

I danced with Mia, and the drunker she became, the more determined she seemed to contain me. I spun away.^[5]

Instead, at the same drunken party Silver runs into Marie, a student not even in his own class, who seduces . . . but here I need to stop, because the natural choice of words slightly misrepresents what happens in the novel. While Mr. Silver is the point-of-view character (and there are three, this Marie being one of the other two), he says she intentionally grinded on him at the party (my choice of words), which is to say, while fully clothed and dancing, “She pushed tight against my cock, which hardened immediately.”^[6] But Silver as narrator portrays himself as reluctant—and in fact, one of the points that rings very true in the novel is the sense of role boundaries that teachers have. When you are a teacher, you are not merely in loco parentis in theory, but also as a state of mind. That means: these kids are under your protection. You are responsible for them. If they are staging a wild, drunken party, you really don’t want to be there because normally the situation is under your control and that is a situation where you have no control. But the flipside of in loco parentis is you avoid any situation where you might be caught alone with a student. You leave the room door open so that the teacher across the hall can hear you. These are the boundaries, the no-go zones that Silver’s initial instinct is to respect. One of the more amusing things about the relationship he ultimately becomes involved in with Marie is that Silver is teacherly even while he is committing statutory rape. He is the most gentle of lovers, Marie tells us; he asks her if she needs anything; he encourages her to follow her dreams and reach for the stars and all the humdrum matter of inspirational classroom wall decorations, except in Silver’s case it’s pillow talk. There is something perverse in this odd jangling of stability and instability, degeneracy and authority. Alexander Maksik has built Will Silver up as this heroic amalgam of teacher tropes, perhaps, in order to flay those same tropes, to show it to be what Marie’s friend Ariel calls Silver late in the book “a fake, Mr. Silver. Pathetic.”—or at least, that’s the interpretation of the novel offered up by Lede 1, and a credible one based on a surface reading the plot.

But the plot can also be understood not as a cautionary tale so much as an evocation (and perhaps celebration) of a peculiar kind of hero. (Lede 2, which is in line with the view of Adam Langer in The New York Times, who identifies Silver with Meursault, the anarchic hero of Albert Camus’s 1942 novel L’Etranger.) Langer points out the significance of the word Nothing in the title of the novel, and I agree that the idea of nothingness, of spiritual emptiness, is the ground on which Maksik builds sympathy for each of his point-of-view character: Silver, Marie, and a senior in Silver’s seminar class, Gilad.

Gilad—a disaffected son of rich Iranian parents, whose been bounced around from school to school—is the conscience of the novel, though what he is conscious of is emptiness, nothingness, meaninglessness. He tells us from the first page: Other people talk about “home,” but to expatriate brats like himself (and expatriate adults like Silver) there is no home. They are in France, but not French. They play at being Americans, eating American foods and wearing American clothing, but there is an emptiness to their lives (of the kind that, say, Bret Easton Ellis is known for excavating.) And into this void enters Silver, with his penchant for assigning slightly more literary (and French) texts than the typical teacher, his nonchalance about rule-breaking, his (heavy-handed I think, and a bit—oh goodness, I’m really going to say this—Sage on the Stage) Socratic method of conducting his seminars; the combination of nonchalance about what a teenager like Gilad views as a nuisance, combined with the serious treatment of the materials (such as would make a Gilad feel more like an adult) makes Mr. Silver an idol for Gilad.

Marie’s relationship with Silver is different, and I would say the least developed by Maksik in terms of complexity—although maybe realistic. (I’ve never slept with a student; I wouldn’t know.) The general theme is that Marie has been continually teased by her putative friend Ariel (who is really an abusive friend) for not being sexually experienced enough. For Marie, sleeping with Silver is her way of feeling empowered like an adult. This is a fairly common theme: We’ve all heard about the teenagers who are “dating a guy in college.” But when a high school teacher is involved, however, society (not the law, but society) stops tittering about it and considers it a significant criminal offense. (When the student is a male and the teacher a female, some people still titter.) I would say that moral emptiness is also a part of Marie’s story, but it is not so well-defined as it is in the point-of-view chapters for Gilad and Will. Her motivations seem more straightforwardly about feeling powerful, feeling important, and then feeling jealousy when it becomes clear that Silver could hardly cultivate the relationship to the level Marie fantasizes about. There are parts of the book where it dawns on Marie how little Silver thinks of their relationship. She hears him repeat in class things he said to her when they are lying in bed. She concludes:

It was awful and suddenly I had that same terrible, as if he was a ghost, or I was a ghost, and that he’d never love me. I was just filling space.^[7]

The ending of the book, I can say, was not unexpected. The questions You Deserve Nothing provokes before it’s inevitable denouement nonetheless did make it a compelling read despite those parts here and there I found to stretch credulity.

1. ^[1]Answer: You get me, three years ago; I’m kidding . . . sort of.↩
2. ^[2] Okay, that’s also an exaggeration. If the teacher and student were the last two humans living and tasked with rescuing humanity from extinction, that would be the most sympathetic possible teacher philandering story; this assumes, of course, that we accept the absolute moral authority of modern rape statutes, which criminalize the same relationships between men and boys which were de rigeur in Classical Greece, or those typical between men and girls in Elizabethan times—”younger than [Juliet] are happy mothers made,” says Paris, albeit with Capulet’s notable objection; but before anyone associates me with NAMBLA, I wish to make clear: I am not endorsing past doctrine, just pointing out the shaky ground on which we’ve based our current stricture; and with that digressive context in mind—goodbye, future in politics!—now let’s return to the present book.↩
3. ^[3] Although Maksik notably lets Silver perform this for his senior seminar class, not his underclassmen, who are experienced as little more than a routine grind↩
4. ^[4] I had a teacher like this my sophomore year of high school, though I think Mr. Knupp is example of how in order to make the Silver model (such as it is) successful with any but the most docile, most pliable students (i.e. seniors in a seminar class, who are basically the better sort of college freshmen) it takes a certain amount of preparation and, yes, structure; the force of personality simply does not, cannot paper over all problems—at least not in real-life, as opposed to television.↩
5. ^[5] You Deserve Nothing, pg. 39.↩
6. ^[6] I notice none of the blurbs call this one an “erotic” novel, even though it portrays a significant amount of sex. Perhaps, given the subject matter, they thought that might be in poor taste. Incidentally, at my middle school I remember the principal imposed an explicit ban on “grinding” at school dances. It was quite the subject of conversation.↩
7. ^[7]You Deserve Nothing, pg. 252. The quote this calls to mind for me Orlando’s “I fill up a place, which may be better supplied when I have made it empty,” though the book is mostly bereft of outright Bardolatry so I doubt that was a direct reference.↩