by Andrew Hedglin
I was drawn to pick up Michael Knight’s new novel, At Briarwood School for Girls, this spring because I remember appreciating his previous book, Eveningland, a collection of loosely interconnected short stories set around Mobile Bay, two years ago when he came for a signing. Knight’s writing can sometimes be very subtle and quiet, but also haunting and beautiful.
Knight’s new novel, set in 1994 at a boarding school in rural Virginia, is told from the perspective of Lenore Littlefield, a pregnant student of hidden talents and opaque motivations, and two lonely faculty members ostensibly charged with the education and guidance of Littlefield and her peers. The first person to whom Lenore reveals her predicament is her well-intentioned but somewhat indecisive history teacher, Lucas Bishop.
The final main character is Coach Patricia Fink, the basketball coach who prefers to live rather Zen-fully in the moment. She is not a fan of complications, but complications start to pile up after she inherits the task of directing the school play when the regular drama teacher departs on unexpected maternity leave. The selection of Coach Fink is no accident, however, as the headmistress keenly remembers her star turn as Maria in a Briarwood production of West Side Story, once upon a time.
The play Coach Fink is tasked with overseeing is The Phantom of Thornton Hall, a Pulitzer Prize winner from twenty years prior, written by one of Briarwood’s most famous–and enigmatic–alumni, Eugenia Marsh. The play, set in a Briarwood-like boarding school, is a conversation between a pregnant teenager and a ghost of a former student haunting the dormitory. Naturally, through a series of short machinations, Lenore is cast in the lead role, playing out her secret on stage.
Meanwhile, the Disney corporation threatens development just outside the ivied walls of the school. Opinion is starkly divided on campus about the construction of Disney’s America theme park just miles from the Manassas battlefield (a real thing that happened in the early 1990s in Virginia). This motif serves as a metaphor for the trio of main characters struggling to adapt to change in their own lives.
Ultimately, though, we can’t live in the past, cannot return to it. The best we can do is use it for counsel, which each character learns to do in their own unique way. It is a dreamy scene that Michael Knight sets before us to ponder these mysteries, in a time that can only seem simpler in retrospect.
Michael Knight will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, May 15, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss At Briarwood School for Girls.
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