Offseason Commentary by Avigayl Sharp – a bad joke about a lame coach | Fiction

TThe 28-year-old uncredited author of Avigayl Sharp’s debut novel teaches writing at a girls’ boarding school in the US, and it’s not going well. He has withdrawn from his friends, is addicted to stimulants and cries easily. He is also sexually active, which he considers a childhood nightmare, and is deeply influenced by Joseph Stalin (“his brutality, and his paranoia, reminded me a lot of my mother”).

The children of this school are naive and free. One of them thinks: “This guy Kafka kept acting like everything was out of his control… I thought, why don’t you do something, dude?” Another “let his head fall on the window, exhausted by the effort of speech” after speaking three sentences in a class discussion. They’re not keen on reading – “due to the mental damage of everyday technology” – so he gives them a 900-page book by Charles Dickens, Bleak House.

The offseason is a funny portrait of the fixed psyche. The descriptive word is dead to the point of being meaningless. (“I’ve got a few very clear and serious ideas, I thought.”) Big, unexpected one-sided conversations happen out of context, like Rachel Cusk’s Outline posting. After learning that the school staff member is Bulgarian, the narrator – who is of Eastern European Jewish heritage – downloads information about the problems of different races. She thinks it might explain her mother’s “idea of ​​buying crappy designer handbags at the official site…then forcing me to look and complimenting everyone exaggeratedly, then winking and accusing me of wanting to die so I could have all the handbags”.

This strong mother-daughter figure appears when she goes to live with her parents during the final break that gives the book its title. Another interesting exchange confirms that his mother was difficult, but the narrator also reveals that he was also a compulsive liar as a child, which suggests that his memory may not be reliable. At this time, her father helpfully explains: “Jewish people like your mother have unacceptable histories, due to the Nazi Holocaust, fleeing the Soviet Union for the sake of the nation of Israel, cruel parents, separated sisters, and various other reasons.”

This clear, on-the-nose approach gently responds to the rich tradition of – in which this novel is also – fiction that explores individual relationships and the collective experience. Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint springs to mind, as well as recent titles such as Katharina Volckmer’s The Appointment and Will Self’s Quantity Theory of Morals. Sharp’s protagonist is a mystery, and he is deeply rooted in explaining what made him so. He brings these challenges into the classroom, which is surprising given his small cases. “I wrote ‘Horrible Olympics – what if it’s good?’ on the whiteboard.” In theory, however, he doesn’t seem to have the smart ideas and disruptive methods that he asks for, and he says clearly: “My parents didn’t have close friends, because of their low interest and bad personality”.

Sometimes people are misrepresented for reasons that should be unknown, and the many strange and interesting ways that appear can be more compelling than what caused them. The offseason skewers, simultaneously and with droll wit, familiar notes in recent fiction: the persuasiveness of the horror plot; the gooey sentimentalism of the adventure book; the narcissism of autofiction; the weighty advance of the subject at the cost of the composition.

Sharp’s 21st-century narrator descended on Muriel Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie. Unlike him, he is on a contract for a while, and lacks courage in his beliefs, preferring to wander around in the fun of cartoon people. His problem makes him the avatar of a growing population, which has been affected by a lack of money, culture wars and the brain rot caused by smartphones. Under such circumstances, teaching young Americans about Dickens’s London can be a difficult task indeed. (One of his students asks: “Has the exam been foggy?”) The story of the offseason is related to the idea of ​​futility – the novel builds to an elliptical anticlimax – but when the journey is this exciting, the destination doesn’t matter.