At the intersection of privilege and consent, many men make wrong choices. Men can do terrible things, often when — especially because of differences in social power — we think we can get away with them. Rape is on a continuum of sexual and non-sexual violence perpetrated primarily by males. That “not all men” abuse their power and privilege via sexual violence is commonly trumpeted — but that so many of us do is generally given short shrift.
The central character in Zoe Whittall’s flawless new novel, The Best Kind of People — George Woodbury, a beloved high-school teacher in an affluent Connecticut community who once heroically tackled a gunman who prowled the school’s halls — is charged with the attempted rape of a minor and sexual misconduct with four minors. The aftermath of the charges and his trial form the basis of a potent examination of family, relationships and the things we fail to see in those we love.
The setting of The Best Kind of People in the United States was a canny choice for Whittall — who has done her time in the wilds of Canlit, having written numerous award-winning novels and poetry books over the past decade and a half. The book is deserving of a wider audience — it contributes in a provocative yet even-handed way to the ongoing and always timely conversation on rape culture south of the border, above it and beyond. With its recent Giller nod, this may just be Whittall’s breakout novel, and deservedly so.
Whittall overturns the typical cultural narrative when well-known men are accused of rape — she gives very little airtime to “his side of the story.” George spends most of the book behind the scenes and behind bars, and Whittall uses this constraint to focus squarely on the fissures wrought on the family he has left behind. His wife Joan swells with shame, humiliation and embarrassment. An experienced trauma nurse, she wrestles with the hope that George is innocent yet asks herself, if it is possibly true, how could she not have known?
“I didn’t know,” she said to Clara, who nodded in a way that said she believed her sister. “I knew Andrew was gay by the time he was seven. I knew Sadie had a higher than average intelligence before the special tests came in and pronounced her a mini genius. I can spot a fake seizure from across a crowded emergency room. I know how much pain even the most stoic man is in by the way he walks!” Joan was circling the kitchen island now, arms in the air for emphasis. “I knew Dad was having an affair when I was only fourteen!”
Son Andrew, a lawyer who moved to New York City from the novel’s fictional WASP small-town setting of Avalon Hills to escape its claustrophobia and homophobia, seems at first to want to believe his dad at all costs. But Whittall places more focus on his sister Sadie, who has just turned seventeen the day the cops show up to arrest her father.
Via her boyfriend Jimmy, Sadie has only barely been introduced to the joys and discomforts of even consensual sex. She knows the accusers since they all go to the same prep school; one of them is the younger daughter of her own best friend. Sadie is savvy about male violence and rape culture and becomes sceptical of her father fairly early on, despite wanting the allegations to be false: “Of course this is a mistake.” Her mother Joan neatly encapsulates the unjailed Woodburys’ conundrum while arguing with her unsympathetic sister, Clara: “You don’t stop loving someone in an instant because somebody accuses them of something despicable.”
As George’s trial looms, there are plenty of twists and turns to the story, apportioned with care. With her skilful plotting and meticulously controlled revelation of key story developments, Whittall recalls the best of British crime television dramas, perhaps unsurprising given her own experience in writing for TV. Research clearly went into the scenes in which Joan visits a support group for women in her situation, as we watch her struggle not to become completely unspooled.
The deployment of a novel-within-the-novel subplot could have been a dicey choice, but here it adds to Whittall’s complex exploration of her themes of trust, longing, consent and differences of age. Sadie’s boyfriend Jimmy lives with mother Elaine and her layabout partner Kevin, a past-his-prime author looking to break out of his sales slump. Kevin seizes on the Woodbury case as fodder for his next novel in a desperate bid to jumpstart his stalled career — turning on his seductive charm with teenaged Sadie as a way to gather necessary character insights.
The Best Kind of People deals with charged and topical issues — rape and male privilege are sadly never not au courant. But Whittall is not a polemicist, and all facets of the issue are explored with nuance and sophistication. While author Kevin’s manipulation of Sadie highlights another sort of male exploitation, Whittall suggests that not all interactions between youth and adults are necessarily inherently unethical. The Woodbury son Andrew reveals that when he was Sadie’s age, he was in love and intimate with his high-school gym coach. Neither was damaged by the experience — at least not overtly, as gracefully articulated by Whittall in several scenes in which Andrew and his coach’s paths cross again, now both adults.
Descriptive prose and details of the action reveal mood and character, adding depth to the novel. In the car right after she finds Sadie’s school bag in the garbage defaced with the word WHORE, “Joan wanted to say something but couldn’t, so she switched on the radio and reversed a little too frantically, toppling the trash bin.” Lovely, minute observations ground Sadie in her body, as when she “picked at the scab on her knee that had dried in the shape of Florida. A chunk of Key West broke free under her nail.” Later during an impromptu handjob Sadie offers Jimmy, “She curled her hand around him, noting the chips in her manicure.”
The novel’s opening scene takes place years before George’s arrest. In it, he rescues students from a gunman, high on meth, who shows up at school to kill the secretary and himself. She is his girlfriend; he’d raped her the night before. Sadie watches her dad tackle the would-be killer as “a trickle of urine ran down her left leg, soaking her green cotton knee socks.” Through this dramatic commencement, Whittall sets the stage for what follows: a complicated and gripping exploration of the public and private dimensions of male violence. And she closes it with an ending that is as unexpected as it is believable, as perfect as it is heart-breaking. Her most mature and compelling work to date, this novel is a winner.
Anansi | 424 pages | $22.95 | paper | ISBN 978-1770899421
Read an excerpt from The Best Kind of People in the Winnipeg Review
‘The Best Kind of People’ by Zoe Whittall
Book Reviews
At the intersection of privilege and consent, many men make wrong choices. Men can do terrible things, often when — especially because of differences in social power — we think we can get away with them. Rape is on a continuum of sexual and non-sexual violence perpetrated primarily by males. That “not all men” abuse their power and privilege via sexual violence is commonly trumpeted — but that so many of us do is generally given short shrift.
The central character in Zoe Whittall’s flawless new novel, The Best Kind of People — George Woodbury, a beloved high-school teacher in an affluent Connecticut community who once heroically tackled a gunman who prowled the school’s halls — is charged with the attempted rape of a minor and sexual misconduct with four minors. The aftermath of the charges and his trial form the basis of a potent examination of family, relationships and the things we fail to see in those we love.
The setting of The Best Kind of People in the United States was a canny choice for Whittall — who has done her time in the wilds of Canlit, having written numerous award-winning novels and poetry books over the past decade and a half. The book is deserving of a wider audience — it contributes in a provocative yet even-handed way to the ongoing and always timely conversation on rape culture south of the border, above it and beyond. With its recent Giller nod, this may just be Whittall’s breakout novel, and deservedly so.
Whittall overturns the typical cultural narrative when well-known men are accused of rape — she gives very little airtime to “his side of the story.” George spends most of the book behind the scenes and behind bars, and Whittall uses this constraint to focus squarely on the fissures wrought on the family he has left behind. His wife Joan swells with shame, humiliation and embarrassment. An experienced trauma nurse, she wrestles with the hope that George is innocent yet asks herself, if it is possibly true, how could she not have known?
“I didn’t know,” she said to Clara, who nodded in a way that said she believed her sister. “I knew Andrew was gay by the time he was seven. I knew Sadie had a higher than average intelligence before the special tests came in and pronounced her a mini genius. I can spot a fake seizure from across a crowded emergency room. I know how much pain even the most stoic man is in by the way he walks!” Joan was circling the kitchen island now, arms in the air for emphasis. “I knew Dad was having an affair when I was only fourteen!”
Son Andrew, a lawyer who moved to New York City from the novel’s fictional WASP small-town setting of Avalon Hills to escape its claustrophobia and homophobia, seems at first to want to believe his dad at all costs. But Whittall places more focus on his sister Sadie, who has just turned seventeen the day the cops show up to arrest her father.
Via her boyfriend Jimmy, Sadie has only barely been introduced to the joys and discomforts of even consensual sex. She knows the accusers since they all go to the same prep school; one of them is the younger daughter of her own best friend. Sadie is savvy about male violence and rape culture and becomes sceptical of her father fairly early on, despite wanting the allegations to be false: “Of course this is a mistake.” Her mother Joan neatly encapsulates the unjailed Woodburys’ conundrum while arguing with her unsympathetic sister, Clara: “You don’t stop loving someone in an instant because somebody accuses them of something despicable.”
As George’s trial looms, there are plenty of twists and turns to the story, apportioned with care. With her skilful plotting and meticulously controlled revelation of key story developments, Whittall recalls the best of British crime television dramas, perhaps unsurprising given her own experience in writing for TV. Research clearly went into the scenes in which Joan visits a support group for women in her situation, as we watch her struggle not to become completely unspooled.
The deployment of a novel-within-the-novel subplot could have been a dicey choice, but here it adds to Whittall’s complex exploration of her themes of trust, longing, consent and differences of age. Sadie’s boyfriend Jimmy lives with mother Elaine and her layabout partner Kevin, a past-his-prime author looking to break out of his sales slump. Kevin seizes on the Woodbury case as fodder for his next novel in a desperate bid to jumpstart his stalled career — turning on his seductive charm with teenaged Sadie as a way to gather necessary character insights.
The Best Kind of People deals with charged and topical issues — rape and male privilege are sadly never not au courant. But Whittall is not a polemicist, and all facets of the issue are explored with nuance and sophistication. While author Kevin’s manipulation of Sadie highlights another sort of male exploitation, Whittall suggests that not all interactions between youth and adults are necessarily inherently unethical. The Woodbury son Andrew reveals that when he was Sadie’s age, he was in love and intimate with his high-school gym coach. Neither was damaged by the experience — at least not overtly, as gracefully articulated by Whittall in several scenes in which Andrew and his coach’s paths cross again, now both adults.
Descriptive prose and details of the action reveal mood and character, adding depth to the novel. In the car right after she finds Sadie’s school bag in the garbage defaced with the word WHORE, “Joan wanted to say something but couldn’t, so she switched on the radio and reversed a little too frantically, toppling the trash bin.” Lovely, minute observations ground Sadie in her body, as when she “picked at the scab on her knee that had dried in the shape of Florida. A chunk of Key West broke free under her nail.” Later during an impromptu handjob Sadie offers Jimmy, “She curled her hand around him, noting the chips in her manicure.”
The novel’s opening scene takes place years before George’s arrest. In it, he rescues students from a gunman, high on meth, who shows up at school to kill the secretary and himself. She is his girlfriend; he’d raped her the night before. Sadie watches her dad tackle the would-be killer as “a trickle of urine ran down her left leg, soaking her green cotton knee socks.” Through this dramatic commencement, Whittall sets the stage for what follows: a complicated and gripping exploration of the public and private dimensions of male violence. And she closes it with an ending that is as unexpected as it is believable, as perfect as it is heart-breaking. Her most mature and compelling work to date, this novel is a winner.
Anansi | 424 pages | $22.95 | paper | ISBN 978-1770899421
Read an excerpt from The Best Kind of People in the Winnipeg Review