Chatham School Affair (Cook)

The Chatham School Affair 
Thomas H. Cook, 1996
Random House
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780553571936


Summary
Winner, Mystery Writers of America Edgard Award

Attorney Henry Griswald has a secret: the truth behind the tragic events the world knew as the Chatham School Affair, the controversial tragedy that destroyed five lives, shattered a quiet community, and forever scarred the young boy.

Layer by layer, in The Chatham School Affair, Cook paints a stunning portrait of a woman, a school, and a town in which passionate violence seems impossible...and inevitable.

"Thomas Cook's night visions, seen through a lens darkly, are haunting," raved the New York Times Book Review, and The Chatham School Affair will cement this superb writer's position as one of crime fiction's most prodigious talents, a master of the unexpected end. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—September 19, 1947
• Where—Fort Payne, Alabama, USA
• Education—B.A., Georgia State College; M.A., Hunter 
   College; MPhil., Columbia University
• Awards—Edgar Award, Barry Award; Martin Beck Award
• Currently—lives in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and New York,
   New York


Thomas H. Cook is an American author, whose 1996 novel The Chatham School Affair received an Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America. He has written at least 25 novels.

Cook was born in Fort Payne, Alabama, and holds a bachelors degree from Georgia State College, and a masters degree in American history from Hunter College in 1972, and in 1976 earned a M.Phil degree from Columbia University.

From 1978 to 1981, Cook taught English and History at Dekalb (GA) Community College, and served as a book review editor for Atlanta magazine from 1978 to 1982, when he took up writing full time.

Cook began his first novel, Blood Innocents, while he was still in graduate school. It was published in 1980, and he has published steadily since then. A movie version of one of his books, Evidence of Blood, was released in 1997. Cook lives with his family in Cape Cod and New York City.

Six of his novels have been nominated for awards, including Red Leaves in 2006, which was also shortlisted for the CWA Duncan Lawrie Dagger and the Anthony Award, and went on to win the Barry Award and The Martin Beck Award. (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
A seductive book ... the key to this mystery lies in the mind of the narrator. The pleasure is finding a new perspective to read that mind.
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times Book Review


Like the best of his crime-writing colleagues, Cook uses the genre to open a window onto the human condition. In this literate, compelling novel, he observes the lives of people doomed to fates beyond their control and imagination. One character here comments: "If you look back on your life and ask, What did I do?, then it means that you didn't do anything." Elizabeth Channing is trying to change the path of her life as, in 1926, she arrives to teach art at a small boys' school located in the Cape Cod village of Chatham. Believing that "life is best lived at the edge of folly," she immediately enthralls the novel's narrator, Henry, the headmaster's son. But Elizabeth is drawn to a fellow teacher, Leland Reed, a freethinker who is unhappily married and has begun to have serious doubts about his life. The inevitable tragedy and its aftermath is narrated by a mature, melancholy Henry looking back at the strange, bleak fates of those involved. Cook is a marvelous stylist, gracing his prose with splendid observations about people and the lush, potentially lethal landscape surrounding them. Events accelerate with increasing force, but few readers will be prepared for the surprise that awaits at novel's end. Literary boundaries mean little to Cook; crime fiction is much the better for that.
Publishers Weekly


The destruction that passion can wreak is well demonstrated in this austere new novel by the author of Breakheart Hill. From the August day in 1926 that Elizabeth Channing comes to teach art at a private school outside Boston, Henry Griswald, son of the headmaster, finds himself a willing accomplice in the love affair between Channing and Leland Reed, a World War I veteran and fellow teacher. Now a bachelor in his seventies, Griswald looks back over a year in his adolescence that culminated in violent death and the destruction of innocent lives, a year that taught him the dangers of strong emotions. Although none of the characters except Henry is well developed, it's particularly difficult to understand what attraction the lovers have for each another. Cook effectively builds the tension through the use of foreshadowing. This well-written, genre-stretching mystery starts slowly and delivers a powerful ending. Appropriate for public libraries of all sizes. —Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
Library Journal


This is a powerful, engaging, and deeply moving novel, highly recommended for all who enjoy well-crafted, genre-bending crime fiction. —George Needham
Booklist


From a celestial-seeming distance, Henry Griswald looks back on 1926-27, the year disaster overtook the Chatham School, where his mild, proper father served as headmaster until the events precipitated by the fatal arrival of art teacher Elizabeth Channing and English teacher Leland Reed. Henry remembers how he accepted Miss Channing's tutelage in drawing and helped Reed work on the boat he was building to sail away from Massachusetts, ignoring his family's orphaned boarder Sarah Doyle to fantasize instead about the free-spirited couple, and deploring the resistance of Reed's inconvenient wife and daughter. Pausing in his leisurely narrative to throw out hints of an impending calamity at Black Pond, recall his own testimony at Miss Channing's trial for murder, and observe the principals staggering under the weight of their past and future, Henry evokes by turns the lovers' stifled passion, his unreasoning hatred of his father and his determination to avoid growing up to be like him, and his crushing retrospective guilt at whatever it is that he has become. Readers who aren't exasperated by the glacial pace will find themselves entranced. Though Cook's story this time is less rich and resonant than Breakheart Hill (1995), reading it is like watching another avalanche in agonizing, exquisite slow-motion.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Chatham School Affair:

1. What is it about Elizabeth Channing that makes her so attractive to men, young and mature? Is she intentionally provocative? What is the ethos by which she lives her life?

2. Why is Leland Reed dissatisfied with his life? What does he long for? What is the attraction between Elizabeth and him? Does their romance feel real to you?

3. Describe the town of Chatham, Massachusetts, and its people? Why does young Henry Griswald perceive it as repressive? Is he correct?

4. Do you feel the characters "deserve" the ending they get at the book's conclusion?

5. Then there's Henry Griswald. How do the events of the story affect or change him? What is his secret and why has he kept it all these years? Why did Henry return to Chatham given the tragedy that took place there and the fact that he had resented the town as a child?

6. What about the pace of the story? Some reviewers felt it was maddeningly slow; others were captivated, driven to continue reading. How did the pace strike you?

7. Cook uses "foreshadowing"—a writer's technique in which authors give hints, sometimes through parallel occurrences, of events that will happen later. Can you point to any of the foreshadowing Cook uses?

8. What emotions did you experience while reading The Chatham School Affair? Were you unsettled, anxious ... or not? Some critics spoke of an impending sense of doom? If you felt it also, how does Cook create that atmosphere, or mood?

9. Were you intrigued by the twists and turns the plot took? Were you surprised by the ending ... or did you find it predictable? In all, does the book deliver?

10. Would you classify this as a standard mystery novel? Or is it something else? How does it compare to other crime/ detective stories you've read?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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