I enjoyed Peter Shull’s debut, Why Teach?. And unlike Alex Sorondo, I think the question mark is well placed, even if the hesitancy of a question bleeds into the narrative of the book.
While I try to figure out my own path forward with my self-published novel, I’ve been paying close attention to the so called “Substack Novels” and their writers, seeing how they market themselves, what persona they wear—are they being themself or is the author different from the man? (I should say person, but let’s be honest, the Substack novelists feels a bit like a boys club atm.)
The next step of the plan is to read all of these author’s books and see how they hold up. I should note, it is a weird thing to read someone’s book and then be able to interact with the writer on here. Holding someone’s novel, reading it, is so intimate. I blush at the fact that I can send a message to them and they will likely reply. It may take a while to work through my list, as my budget for new books is slim. I’m a ThriftBooks kind of guy. But, if I want people to buy my book new, I’ll have to start buying new books as well.
I chose Shull’s Why Teach? because Shull seemed the most kin to me. I didn’t read any of the serialized portions of his book, but from the way he and others talked about it, I felt he’d be a good starting point. Something to dips my toes in, something accessible. He seemed to be a more introverted part of the crowd, more small town, more melancholic. These qualities drew me to his book. And perhaps, also, that I wrote the first draft of my novel while substitute teaching. Though my novel has nothing to do with that experience.
Honeymooning in Savannah, Ga, I took Shull’s book to Forsyth Park. I sat by the big fountain and read and read. Then I took it to the beach, to breakfast, to bars (my wife and I are the type to perch up at a dive bar and read). I found it so satisfying to read—the flow and pacing fit the subject. When I wasn’t reading it, I wanted to be. But I was on my honeymoon and knew I also needed to be going on ghost tours and sunset cruises.
Luckily, I’d finished the book only a third into my honeymoon and could read something lighter. Something my wife could more easily pull me away from. Something that really did pair well with a Pina Colada. Whereas Shull’s work, in all reality, pairs better with a glass of whiskey.
But I continued to think about Peter Shull’s book and his protagonist, Will Able.
A note on auto-fiction
Some say writing what you know is lazy. Yet, when you set out to write personalities, careers, situations you think you know, you quickly realize that there is a nearly infinite distance between you and a character pretty much based on you. Things you thought you understood, you start to realize you don’t know much about it at all.
One thing literary fiction seems more conscious of is how it is written from the author’s location. It doesn’t care as much as commercial fiction to shy away from that. It can take a mundane part of life and provoke it. Yes, there is more expectation put on the reader to do the work, but this is for their good. It develops their own character, strengthens their mind, makes them more open. Less of a consumer.
Auto-fiction goes poorly when the writer veers toward writing a nearly day-to-day account of what was going on in their life at a specific time and place. I did not enjoy Batuman’s The Idiot or Either/Or because of this, even if she did rope me in with her Dostoevsky and Kierkegaardian teasing.
However, when auto-fiction goes well, it seems to break free from the day-to-day accounting. This allows for an original plot to break through. At this point, who cares if it is auto-fiction? Perhaps the main character has the same personality as the author, maybe even the same job (Why Teach?) but the situation is original. What the author is doing is exploring who they are by putting their characters in situations that require them to act because they don’t know who they really are or how they would act if that situation arose in their real life. By doing this, they are inviting the reader to join in this exploration.
In the first described auto-fiction, the author knows how the main character is going to act because they are simply writing down how they have acted. There is no exploration, only a relaying of information that usually isn’t very interesting or rewarding.
Whereas Shull seems to go back into his past, perhaps his early days of teaching, to write a character similar to himself, he leaves Will Able’s future open from the first lines of the page.
I don’t trust memoirs to be honest but I do hope for auto-fiction to be. Memoirs too often try to convince you their author’s real life is interesting; auto-fiction invites you to explore how every subject and every person is a mystery worth considering through the lens of one individual.
Reflection on Why Teach?
My capacity for critique and review is admittedly shallow, but I can reflect. Hopefully, in so doing, I can witness to the subjectivity of the novel. That is, how it affects its readers, its subjects, like me (who can only read the book from the context of also having just released my debut—where my narrator is also a late 20s man unfulfilled in his life and job and relationships).
The wake of the best friend’s dead brother makes for a great opening but then it’s mostly forgotten. If anything, Will and his best friend Davis might be expected to have a fight where Will blames Davis’ brother’s death for why he’s not moving forward. He might even suggest Davis isn’t properly mourning because he’s able to be so successful. Or Davis should accuse Will of being too attached when it’s not even his own brother. In other words, the grief over the death seems only to be brought up when it is convenient, or, more accurately, when Will is already feeling isolated and melancholy. Otherwise it’s missing from the narrative.
As far as I can tell and remember, the death doesn’t have a serious effect on the school. I found this odd as well. We’re told the students mourned for a week, but the mourning ends after the funeral, which is where the book starts. When I was in grade school, there were a few student deaths. It left a weird, outright ominous feeling over the school campus for weeks. I digress, perhaps the death is more involved in Will’s situation than it appears but I didn’t feel it.
There were a few sentences that I found clunky, or unnecessarily disruptive of the flow. An example:
Stopping at the first pair of golden arches I came across, I bolted two breakfast burritos, a hotcake and sausage tray, and a plastic cup of orange juice, taking a Styrofoam cup of coffee to go, learning from the sports section of an abandoned copy of the Wichita Eagle that my Chargers had ultimately fallen to the Red Demons by a score of fifty-six to seventeen.
Of course, I have to give him cred for his use of bolted. I thought he was abusing aesthetic liberties, so I was happily surprised to learn bolted can literally mean shoving food down your gullet. But this sentence is too long. I can forgive a sentence splice if it flows, but the addition of the sports section took me out, even if it was referencing the game from the earlier chapter.
At one point, Will tells a student he’ll be at their football game to make up for missing an earlier game, but then on Friday night he’s eating dinner with his father and hanging out with his friend Garret. No mention of the football game. The lack of mention, while possibly explainable, feels like an inconsistency. If Will is really committed to the good of his students, we, the reader, need to see or hear about him following through on going to the game. Otherwise, perhaps Mrs. Hirsche is right and him doubling down on teaching Shakespeare really is selfish.
But if I seem overeager to criticize, don’t be mistaken. I find this book to succeed in many ways, including ways others seem to not agree. A good amount of the problems I have pointed to, I believe would have been caught and fixed with one more round of edits.
I don’t agree with Sorondo’s characterization that Will doesn’t have enough capacity for debauchery. For reference:
While perhaps not as interesting as adultery and drunkenness, his passivity is a great enough sin to merit exploration. Depression is the opposite of action. It is an oppression of the mind’s willing to be. Sorondo is right, if Will did do the things outlined by Sorondo, he would be a more exciting character to read. However, I think the author isn’t going for excitement; he’s going for an honest depiction.
If Sorondo thinks the author’s description of Will’s depression is too restrained (Sorondo blames Shull’s real-life career as a teacher and the perceptions of his employer), I don’t.
Will Able’s do exist, and I don’t think it’s a fault of the novelist that the way Able relays his depression is restrained. I think that is also a revelatory characteristic of the narrator. The narration itself is muted, diminished, and I find this to fit well when the narrator is depressed. And no depressed guy is over eager to divulge into his masturbatory self pity, even to an imaginary audience.
I’ve been depressed before. What I remember most is how much 90s sitcoms I binged while completely paralyzed on my couch/mattress. Maybe I give Will too much grace, though, since I can relate.
The central conflict is what makes the book worth writing, err reading. It’s a more subtle, passive—befitting of our contemporary world—Fahrenheit-451. The burning of books, or at least banning them, or more acutely: the strong discouragement of engaging real literature with added consequences for the teachers that rebel against this discouragement. This is real. It’s not so much an ideological problem—as the banning of books on a state and national government level so far seems like a big joke. It’s silliness, but it’s not so much dystopian as it is a travesty. Unless you show me the data, I don’t think this is causing the decline in book sales.
The real problem is a lack of encouragement to read quality books, and, in Will Able’s world and sometimes ours, active discouragement—not because these books negatively effect one’s life, but because its not utilitarian. This is how literature dies and Shull makes this clear.
And the antagonist actually raises a good point. (Antagonists should have strong defenses!) These low-income students from minority backgrounds are not being set up for success in modern society by being assigned an onslaught of DWMs (dead white men) or even the later additions of classic works by women (due to the rebuke of the interesting, but rarely present female counterpart to Mr. Able).
That the teaching help book (Stories Don’t Matter in the Real World) Will is given by his superior is ironically titled, mistaken by his superior to support her position when it really supports Will’s, was a satisfying twist and gave the protagonist the élan, the determination, the freedom to teach on his terms.
Something Shull does well is allow his narrator to be wrong and to learn from it. If it is too auto-fictive, at least it isn’t proud. As a teacher, Able fails over and over again. He gets swept up into his grand ideas of what will change his students’ lives. And when it inevitably doesn’t work—high schoolers are indomitable—like every good teacher you’ve ever had, he tries again.
In the end, Mr. Able’s rebuttal overwhelms the utilitarian position. No, these books will not exactly help you make more money or thrive in the society we’ve been given, but they’ll help you be more human.
Why Teach? is a worthwhile read, and I gladly recommend it to you.
Purchase Link here:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/why-teach/51b19d3306e85bff
Kudos on reading a Substack author and writing up the book!
For the record, I don't fault WHY TEACH? because its protagonist isn't debauched; I fault the book because its protagonist is *the only character* who isn't debauched. He's a martyr. And there's something dishonest in the attempt to depict his passivity as a "flaw" rivaling the careerism of another character, a rich person's sociopathy -- other characters have categorical character flaws.
Will Able's only flaw -- and he'll apologize to the moon -- is he eats a lot. He's passive.
These aren't real flaws. They're behaviors. Selfish ones. But he pre-empts even THAT legitimate accusation because, as you mention, the character is depressed -- and what's he depressed about?
He's depressed because the school doesn't believe in literature anymore.
He's depressed ON BEHALF of "the children," that condescending moniker he gives to these 16, 17, 18-year olds.
He's depressed that "the children" won't get the spectacular education that he (alone) might otherwise provide them; because yes, we're made to understand that a select few teachers go against the curriculum, and teach whole novels, but we don't SEE them doing the messianic catcher-in-the-rye-type work that Able's doing in his own classroom. And remember: our protagonist is also our narrator, so *the things that he NOTICES are reflective of his personality/headspace.* And one pivotal thing that he doesn't notice, doesn't tell us about, are the other teachers having the sorts of special bonds with students that Able has. Why? Because he, as the narrator, doesn't notice them. Doesn't look for them. He looks only at the teachers who reinforce his own self-image: the masculine-looking colleague who's actually a big cuddly bear. The two feminazis who ALSO hate literature.
What bothered me about the book is that it's dishonest -- but it's a gaslighty dishonesty predicated on the narrator's performative self-loathing: he's PRETENDING to dislike himself, when really he's obsessed with himself, and if you were to say to him, "You're only pretending to dislike yourself, you're actually self-obsessed," he would do some mopey Eeyore, "Yeah. You're right. I'm the worst. Watch me eat this."
Dude I'm worked up over here lol BUT I DO LIKE THE BOOK, so I agree with you there, which I guess accounts for why this thing kinda hypnotized me, and got my dukes up, is that I resented falling into what seemed like a story being told by a liar -- and yet, it's a work of fiction...
There's layers and layers.
I enjoyed this; hadn't thought of it as a subtler version of "Fahrenheit 451," but it makes sense!
I reviewed the book too - you can find it here: https://lakefrontreview.substack.com/p/why-teach-by-peter-shull