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Two prep-school tales of trouble, redemption

We've all had them: Some school assignments seem to take over your life. For Duncan Meade, a senior at a prestigious old boarding school in Upstate New York, that assignment is the Tragedy Paper.

"The Tragedy Paper" is about a boarding school, an annual assignment, first love, real-life tragedies.
"The Tragedy Paper" is about a boarding school, an annual assignment, first love, real-life tragedies.Read moreFrom the book jacket

By Elizabeth LaBan

Alfred A. Knopf. 320 pp. $17.99

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Reviewed by Katie Haegele

We've all had them: Some school assignments seem to take over your life. For Duncan Meade, a senior at a prestigious old boarding school in Upstate New York, that assignment is the Tragedy Paper.

Mr. Simon's yearly paper is legendary, which is why Duncan is preoccupied with it from the moment he walks under the school's stone archways on the first day of class.

The seniors spend the first half of the year reading Shakespeare and talking about tragic flaws, reversals of fortune, irony, and monomania - the whole bit - and must produce a paper by the end of the year.

But the assignment is unusual and challenging in that it's entirely open-ended. Students are expected to write about a literary tragedy, but they can also talk about tragic events in real life. The two things aren't the same, but as Duncan learns, one can inform the other. He learned this lesson well, after something tragic happened in his own life - something that isn't revealed to the reader until the end of this warm, wise novel.

The Irving School is all about tradition, and one of the many rituals the seniors engage in is the ceremonial handover of the dorm rooms. The graduating seniors all leave behind a gift of some kind for the incoming students to find, and when Duncan arrives in his room, he finds a stack of CDs. It strikes him as unexciting compared to some of the gifts he has heard about (tickets to a Yankees game, a puppy). But he presses "play" anyway, and finds himself listening to a recording of a story - the story of the terrible thing that happened last year at school - told from the central player's perspective.

In this way, debut novelist Elizabeth LaBan, who is married to Inquirer restaurant critic Craig LaBan, gives us two stories, Duncan's and Tim MacBeth's. They're inextricably linked, but turn out to be different in the one way that really matters.

Tim had the room before Duncan, and he wasn't especially happy there. He has albinism, and his unusual appearance is a source of deep pain for him. He has always felt like an outsider. So when his stepfather saw a chance to send Tim to the alma mater he remembers so fondly, he pulled some strings and made it happen. Tim doesn't fare all that well at Irving, but he does fall in love. Painfully so, with a sweet girl named Vanessa, who has an unsweet and very popular boyfriend named Patrick.

Tim, who tells his story in the first person, is a witty and likable narrator. (But cleverly, crucially, he's not entirely reliable.) And LaBan must have the spirit of a teenager, because her rendering of those first feelings of true love is so true, it's electric. Duncan's story feels less significant than Tim's somehow - an all-too-common problem with dual-narrative novels - and it would have been nice to understand the character of Vanessa as something more than a love object. But this novel is relatable and unusually gripping, even for an older reader - full of slings and arrows and outrageous fortune. Readers should find themselves fairly ripping through the pages to uncover the mystery of what happened, and why.

The environment of the Irving School will no doubt be very appealing to some readers, with its hallowed halls and long-held traditions (not to mention the toboggans and hot chocolate that make a snowy day at the Irving School feel a bit like a ski-lodge getaway). But if you find all that a bit precious, take heart: LaBan is not enamored of her characters' privilege. In her deft hands, these are normal kids with universal concerns. Romantic love, hard work, loyalty, friendship, suffering: Like the great tragedies that inspired the novel, it's all here.

LaBan's take on adolescent life is rendered in the sweet, intelligent tradition of John Irving, but without any of the prep-school genre's self-satisfaction.

And in the end, this story is about more than personal failure (and triumph), or the nature of tragedy. It's also a story about art and how it can redeem us. You can find truth in literature, LaBan reminds us, and, in writing your own story, you can discover meaning in the world around you. Even the lowliest school paper can be a path to discovery, if you let it.

Life will hand you all manner of troubles, but as LaBan portrays so eloquently, what matters is what you do with them.