The Truants by Kate Weinberg
Novice writers are subjected to various bits of advice along the lines of, ‘show don’t tell’, ‘avoid adverbs’, ‘keep your sentences short’ and ‘write what you know’. It is this latter admonishment that, on closer consideration, most intrigues. Is a writer of fiction restricted to autobiography? Or, does it mean to write of what is gleaned from observation? From research?
The Truants is a university novel of the ‘coming of age’ variety. The obvious go-to comparison is Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and many reviewers of this book wasted no time in going there. This is, in part, because of the ‘crime’ element of its plot, something that separates it from other, more recent examples, like Sally Rooney’s hugely popular novels. What does connect Tartt and Rooney is how close to their own university experience they were when writing their respective novels. Although The Secret History was published in 1992, 6 years after she left Bennington College, Tartt had started writing it before her graduation. Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends, published 2017, was written while the author was 22 and still in her MA programme at Trinity College Dublin. In contrast, Kate Weinberg has made her debut at twice that age. The Truants is set in the world of today and told in the first-person present tense (the narrator does intimate from time to time that she is recalling events from some as yet,the reader half way through, revealed point in the future) . The author has successfully recreated the world of young adult ambivalence and uncertainty in all its angsty glory. If indeed this is ‘writing what you know’ she has apparently chosen to put aside any life lesson knowledge gained over the last twenty years of her life.
We are related the events of this novel by one Jess Walker, who has enrolled at what is an obviously lightly fictionalized University of East Anglia, the author’s Creative Writing alma mater. She has gone there specifically to study English under a charismatic young professor, Lorna Clay, whom she idolizes. Dr Clay’s specialism is Agatha Christie, which rather neatly allows the introduction of much discussion about murder, guilt and related topics.
Jess shares with the protagonists of most other university coming of age novels, deeply rooted insecurities. For these characters, dealing with identity and self-worth issues goes beyond the usual uncertainty about themselves and their place in the world often felt by young adults. Another shared salient feature is the marked class differences between the protagonists and their new posh, and usually spoilt, friends. Being away from home and in a place where talent and cleverness are valued, and the opportunity for re-invention, gives the characters entry into social milieus that might otherwise be out of their reach. This also serves to ratchet up the tension.
In this business of falling for glamorous people it is useful to remember the original meaning of the word glamour; enchantment, as in magical spells, as in un-real and false. Jess, in spite possessing a bit more self-awareness and self-knowledge than one might credit someone her age, still finds herself drawn ever deeper into relationships with people who are not going to be good for her.
Of course, all this, inevitably, leads to disaster. We wouldn’t have it any other way.
If this is your cup of tea, other books to consider, besides Donna Tartt’s and Sally Rooney’s, would be If We Were Villains by M L Rio, The Likeness by Tana French and The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood.