The Coming Storm

Rating:
Summary: Another beautiful book from Paul Russell
Review: Another beautiful book from Paul Russell, but I must say, it does not have the same impact on me as "War against the animals" had.
But it's beautifully written, in the same somewhat melancholy style. I found the subject sometimes a bit disturbing, I mean, an adult having an intimite relationship with a fifteen-year-old. It sets you thinking on the emotional, ethical, cultural and legal boundaries of such love. But I guess that's what
Russell intented to accomplish. But still, despite the real passion that Tracy and Noah have for each other, I think that Tracy should never have allowed their relationship to happen, however difficult it might have been.

I found that the title of the book was omnipresent throughout the whole story; you constantly sense storms coming up, literall storms, and situations and relationships entering a storm. Only Claire, the headmaster's wife seems to stand tall and strong through all storms raging through the lives of the people she loves around her. Strangely enough, she's the only one who gets caught up in the literall storm, that sends her car crashing. A beautiful caracter in this book.

So, to me, a great read. I've purchased Russell's other novels as well. It seems he's rapidly becoming one of my favorite writers.

Rating:
Summary: Flawed but compelling view of a controversial topic
Review: Paul Russell's ambitious novel tackles a ticklish subject--a developing attraction and eventual sexual relationship at a private boys' school between Tracy Parker, a newly arrived teacher, and Noah Lathrop, a student. Events also involve Louis, the repressed headmaster of the school, conscious of advancing age and career failure, and his patient, searching wife Claire, who in the absence of a satisfying marriage has filled the void with her own teaching and writing. Russell deserves credit for his central assertion that a gay man and an underage boy could have a more or less equal, non-exploitative sexual relationship without lasting damage to either. He clearly is passionate about this stance and the characters of Tracy and Noah are the most clearly and finely delineated in the novel--the steps by which Noah comes to a realization of his own homosexual urges, by way of a fellow student, are particularly convincing. One grows impatient when the story dwells on Louis and Claire, who come off as dreary and indecisive in comparison. The presence of many vividly drawn subsidiary characters, such as Louis' hedonistic friend Reid and Noah's chillingly controlled father, captivates the reader but tends to distract from the main plot--too much is packed into a relatively small space for a satisfactory balance, though there is an unexpected and satisfying, though hardly happy, resolution to the central love affair at the conclusion. "The Coming Storm" is by no means a perfectly controlled or structured novel, yet somehow it haunts the reader afterward in a way that more polished pieces of literature do not.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting characters
Review: This novel of repression being lived in a New York boarding school may deal with uncomfortable topics, especially sex with a minor. Behind much of the narrative tension the repressed and suppressed desire influences the lives of various people. Noah Lathrop III, scion of a wealthy nation-maker, is a confused and troubled teen-ager. Prone to accidents, he lives without the nurturing attention of parents and family. Tracy Parker, the new teacher, is his idol and his idol is falling in love with him. But this relationship has had a precedent at the Forge School and headmaster Louis Tremper has had an involvement with it. Tremper himself finds he is attracted to Parker and attempts to share with him his love of music.

The storm of the plot gathers and comes to grips during a New Year's Even blizzard that finds repression exploding and brings all the tensions of the characters into direct confrontation. Russell touches on these relationships in a realistic rather romantic manner, but his denouement is somewhat too pat. The deus ex machina ending does not really deal with the effects of the storm.

The art of this novel, however, is the blending of several characters as they move to some transition in their lives. They each touch and change and then move on. In some there is growth; in others only acknowledgment. The threads that are not tied reinforce the feeling that human beings may have a relentless destiny to live out interior forces they do not understand and may continue not to understand. Until the next storm.

Rating:
Summary: Strong story, real characters, pedestrian pace
Review: Paul Russell's "The Coming Storm" was a 1999 Lambda Literary Award nominee for gay fiction.

Tracy Parker, 25, is a gay English teacher at a private prep school in upstate New York who, despite his better judgment, falls hard for 15 year old Noah Lathrop III, his confused student. What begins as mentoring an alienated, bright, rich kid turns to friendship, love, and to Tracy's inevitable fall when the equally love-struck boy seduces him. Russell tells a tender story of man-boy love reverently and without exploitation.

Russell takes his characters seriously, considering their struggles from moral, ethical, and humanistic perspectives. Louis Tremper, the school's pathetic headmaster and a kindly if tedious drudge, is a latent homosexual whose stunted, platonic friendships come short of intimacy due to his fearful reserve and failure to reconcile his morality with his nature. His secret, prurient interest in gay affairs is sublimated in duty, opera, and scotch. Claire, his wife, constructs a life through feminism, teaching, and gardening to cope with a lonely marriage to a husband she cannot understand and will not abandon.

Tracy and Noah struggle too. Tracy loves Noah, but feels guilt for betraying his position of trust. He gave up gay life in New York City, seeking a calm in the storm of dead or dying AIDS-stricken lovers, and found it in the rural Forge school. Noah is a boy needing nurture, adrift after his parents' acrimonious divorce, a tool used by wealthy parents to injure each other. Noah's past includes literally setting the woods on fire and expressing his hunger for paternal love by writing transparently Freudian stories. His youth precludes him from understanding his urges, and his every misstep confirms his self-image, in his desparaging words, of "a f***-up."

But the omniscient point of view that makes Russell's three dimensional characterizations possible also flaws the writing. Ultimately, Russell's authorial presence admits no humor but irony, no gift for metaphor, and the narrative is burdened with too many adjectives and hyper-correct adverbs. Too many passages are plodding excursions that become plot detours. It is the novel of a professor who writes very well but self-consciously. I missed the poetry of understatement that Jim Grimsley and Michael Cunningham command. I longed for the story that tells itself, like the novels of Christopher Bram, whose perfect metaphors and faultless pace shine in that author's invisibility.

Still, "The Coming Storm" is a good read that's well worth the time. With tighter editing, Russell will rank among the best writers of gay fiction today.

Rating:
Summary: Aspects of desire
Review: I'm a big fan of "boarding school" fiction, a genre that seems to have gone out of fashion but one that I wish authors would explore more often. In what other setting can a writer so thoroughly explore adolescent relationships with all their intrigue of power, friendship, and sexuality? The fact that most such school stories take place in same-sex institutions only raises the stakes: the kids are uprooted from home, and the authority figures who stand in for their parents -- the teachers and administrators -- can keep only a myopic eye on the goings-on. Left to their own devices, the students are able to explore many avenues that might otherwise be far less accessible to them.

One small disappointment in Paul Russell's "The Coming Storm" is that, while it takes place in a boys' boarding school in New York State, here the school setting seems mainly to serve as a means of bringing its central characters together. While we do glimpse many of the politics and machinations of academia, these scenes deal mainly with the characters who run or teach at the school. Apart from one scene where a pack of boys pulls a cruel prank on a misfit in their ranks, we see little of how the students interact with each other. The disappointment is in passing, though, because it is clear that Russell has other fish to fry.

This is because the main storyline in "The Coming Storm" concerns the relationship between a teacher and one of his students. (On a more universal level, though, what Russell explores is the ways in which each of us must deal with feelings of desire that we may not want to acknowledge.) The four main characters through whom we experience the story are fully realized. Each has an individual way of acting, speaking, and thinking -- something essential in any book that uses an "alternating viewpoint" narrative approach, but all too rare in most cases. In fact, the use of alternating viewpoints has become a bit of a tired device lately. It is to Russell's credit that he carries it off so well, although the predictable rotation of each character up to the podium, so to speak, chapter by chapter, eventually does become a bit distracting.

My chief concern with the book is the way in which I think Russell lets down the character of the teacher, Tracy. In the first half of the novel Tracy is capable of articulating the ways in which the attraction he feels toward Noah (the student) are actually representations of deeper conflicts -- ones that can be (and, in one scene, are) brought out by just about any attractive adolescent boy, whether the boy be a friend or a complete stranger. Tracy seems to know that Noah is in many ways just a personification of a more general desire for something forbidden and, in the end, fleeting. Some of Russell's best writing comes about as he gives voice and metaphor to these insights. Many a gay man will undoubtedly recognize himself here. Yet then, seemingly all of a sudden, in one key scene Tracy's self-understanding goes out the window. He becomes irresponsible and self-indulgent. What makes the turn of events all the more disappointing is that, based on the timeframe of the story, he has needed only about four months (!) to precipitate this downfall. I was still unsure as to why Tracy would risk his career and reputation for the sake of indulging what he has clearly understood to be a deceptive, misdirected feeling.

This leads to something else I missed in the story, which might to know more about the relationship between Noah and Tracy itself, particularly the friendship part. Russell seems so intent on steering the two together that he fails to take advantage of many opportunities to flesh out a true friendship between them. Such a vividly rendered friendship might have made the major turning points in this book a little more sympathetic and believeable.

This said, however, I do not want to detract from this book's ability to deliver a terrific story. I enjoyed "The Coming Storm" a great deal. The descriptions of sex might seem a little too specific to some readers, but in many ways Russell uses sex as another metaphor. In the end it must be said that I felt more relief than sadness when things concluded as they did between Noah and Tracy. The book's ending is hopeful, though -- for one character even redemptive in a way. This was encouraging to see, although it would be interesting to debate whether Russell is implying that Noah turns out well partly due to Tracy's influence or in spite of it.

Rating:
Summary: Another beautiful book from Paul Russell
Review: Another beautiful book from Paul Russell, but I must say, it does not have the same impact on me as "War against the animals" had.
But it's beautifully written, in the same somewhat melancholy style. I found the subject sometimes a bit disturbing, I mean, an adult having an intimite relationship with a fifteen-year-old. It sets you thinking on the emotional, ethical, cultural and legal boundaries of such love. But I guess that's what
Russell intented to accomplish. But still, despite the real passion that Tracy and Noah have for each other, I think that Tracy should never have allowed their relationship to happen, however difficult it might have been.

I found that the title of the book was omnipresent throughout the whole story; you constantly sense storms coming up, literall storms, and situations and relationships entering a storm. Only Claire, the headmaster's wife seems to stand tall and strong through all storms raging through the lives of the people she loves around her. Strangely enough, she's the only one who gets caught up in the literall storm, that sends her car crashing. A beautiful caracter in this book.

So, to me, a great read. I've purchased Russell's other novels as well. It seems he's rapidly becoming one of my favorite writers.

Rating:
Summary: Pointless, obvious, 2-dimensional fairy tale...
Review: I really TRIED to like this book, but in the end, it was impossible. I was hoping for a little depth, a little insight, a little of the sexual tension that's so clear in other classic prep-school novels to which The Coming Storm has inevitably been compared.

There are a couple of promising relationships established here, but their potential is never realized. This book is characterized mostly by lost opportunity, as the potential for character and situational depth gives way to simplistic stereotyping that could just as easily have been composed by a homophobe as by one within the fold.

Obviously, St Martin's Press (a/k/a Stonewall Inn Editions, their queer imprint) has no problem promoting mediocrity. I just hate to think of all the talented gay writers who are having a tough time breaking in while this ditzy author and his fluff novel gets all the glory.

P.S. What dimwit picked this title? Did anyone else find it utterly telegraphic and inane???

Rating:
Summary: Well written but ...
Review: Perhaps I had to much of a high expectation of this book but I was left feeling very unsatisfied. There is no doubt that Paul Russell is an immensely talented writer but I found the characters and their motivations underdone in this particular novel. A difficult enough subject to explore my feelings where left more bewildered by the luck of depth of the main two characters. The minor characters on the otherhand were often more interesting and I would have liked to have got to know them a more. Overall not the best Paul Rusell book around.

Rating:
Summary: You may never again look at a classroom the same way
Review: ... Yes, the topic (sex between teachers and minors) is difficult, and yes, the setup is slow and tedious, with headmaster Louis Tremper's magisterial musings and procrastinations and author Russell's intricate interweaving of themes from "Death in Venice" and other Thomas Mann works. Slow setup notwithstanding, the payoff is incredible.

The attraction that the teacher (Tracy Parker) has for a 15-year-old Fifth Avenue brat (Noah) is regrettable, but it is also transformative: it sets in motion events that free all the major characters in the book, gay and straight, from the numbing legacy of repression, marital infidelity, and abuse that has plagued the private upstate New York school where the novel is set. Yes, Tracy is guilty of having succumbed to the wiles of an youthful but all-too-worldly Noah (a kid whose ex-stepmother French-kisses him at a family shindig) -but Tracy's folly eventually makes Noah and those around him better persons and the school a much more tolerant place. Tracy's flagrant indiscretion is even instrumental in healing several of the faculty members and their spouses. Tracy is a teacher in perhaps the best and worst senses of the word--an irony worthy of Thomas Mann.

...The sex Tracy and Noah improvise is supposed to seem almost too candlelit-romantic yet inordinately clumsy. And the setting -the deep snowy dead of the winter holidays in upstate New York- emphasizes this fantastically idealized forbiddenness. Remember, Tracy (like Aschenbach in "Death in Venice") is as much drawn to an ideal as to Noah himself. And is Tracy really any worse than Reid, a philandering straight teacher who has drawn his wife to the brink of suicide?

Gay and straight readers who actually want to think about what they read, as well as anyone who's read Thomas Mann or Hawthorne in depth, will find Russell's novel richly rewarding. You may never look at teaching in a high school classroom the same way.

Rating:
Summary: Great characters
Review: This could be a simple, ... book about a teacher seducing his vulnerable, 15-year-old student. Sure, Russell included graphic ... in this story, but ...isn't what this first-class novel is about. "The Coming Storm" is compelling reading because the characters are so well drawn. You watch those characters make their choices, knowing almost every choice is wrong. But you can't stop wishing the disaster you can see ahead -- but the characters don't -- could be avoided. You know it can't. And so, like a gawker at an accident, you are drawn into the watching the carnage. It's powerful and will leave you with plenty to think about. I'm recommending it to all my friends.