The Headmaster's Wife
Thomas Christopher Greene, 2013
St. Martin's Press
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250038944
Summary
An immensely talented writer whose work has been described as “incandescent” (Kirkus) and “poetic” (Booklist), Thomas Christopher Greene pens a haunting and deeply affecting portrait of one couple at their best and worst.
Inspired by a personal loss, Greene explores the way that tragedy and time assail one man’s memories of his life and loves. Like his father before him, Arthur Winthrop is the Headmaster of Vermont’s elite Lancaster School. It is the place he feels has given him his life, but is also the site of his undoing as events spiral out of his control. Found wandering naked in Central Park, he begins to tell his story to the police, but his memories collide into one another, and the true nature of things, a narrative of love, of marriage, of family and of a tragedy Arthur does not know how to address emerges.
Luminous and atmospheric, bringing to life the tight-knit enclave of a quintessential New England boarding school, the novel is part mystery, part love story and an exploration of the ties of place and family. Beautifully written and compulsively readable, The Headmaster’s Wife stands as a moving elegy to the power of love as an antidote to grief. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Worcester, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Hobart College; M.F.A., Vermont College
• Currently—lives in Montpelier, Vermont
Thomas Christopher Greene was born and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts to Richard and Dolores Greene, the sixth of seven children. He was educated in Worcester public schools and then Suffield Academy in Suffield, Connecticut. He earned his BA in English from Hobart College in Geneva, New York, where he was the Milton Haight Turk Scholar. His MFA in Writing is from the former Vermont College.
Tom has worked as an oyster shucker, delivered pizza, on the line in a staple factory, as a deputy press secretary for a presidential campaign, the director of public affairs for two universities and as a professor of writing and literature. Since 1993, Tom has resided in central Vermont.
Novels
In 2003, his first novel, Mirror Lake, was published to critical acclaim. His second, I’ll Never Be Long Gone, followed two years later and his third, Envious Moon, was published in 2007. His fiction has been translated into 11 languages and has found a worldwide following. His writing has been called incandescent and poetic and has been nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His first novel was named one of the thirty books to be rediscovered by Waterstone’s in the UK, alongside authors Kurt Vonnegut, Jose Saramango, Alice Hoffmann and others.
Tom’s fourth novel is The Headmaster's Wife, published in 2014. Inspired by a personal tragedy he experienced while creating the college, the novel is his most profound and moving work to date.
Academia
In 2006, after years of writing full time, Tom was asked to lead one of the MFA programs at Vermont College where he had graduated from and had previously served as a senior administrator. Shortly thereafter the university that owned the campus announced that the historic 1868 campus was for sale to developers. The three nationally acclaimed MFA programs—MFA in Writing; MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults; and the MFA in Visual Art—were in danger of closing.
Tom mobilized the college community and the larger community in central Vermont to create a non-profit that could buy the campus and the three academic programs. In two years, with his business partner, Bill Kaplan, Tom raised $13.5M in capital, built a national board of trustees, developed a strategic plan and an infrastructure to manage and run a new academic entity. In June, 2008, Vermont College of Fine Arts became the first new college in Vermont in over 30 years—and the fastest to achieve accreditation in the 125 year history of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. Tom was named the college’s founding President, a position he still serves in today.
In the five years since its inception, Tom has led Vermont College of Fine Arts on a mission to become a national center for education in the arts. Its writing programs enjoy top national rankings and he has started new programs in graphic design, music composition and film. Today, under his leadership, Vermont College of Fine Arts has arguably a greater influence on American Arts and letters than any small school since the heyday of Black Mountain College almost as century ago.
Tom lives in Montpelier, Vermont with his wife and daughter. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Part of a grand literary tradition… But literary overtones notwithstanding, Greene’s plot has the tight, relentless pacing of a fine detective novel… Deeply felt… and utterly absorbing.
Washington Post
A layered story of love, unbearable loss and grief.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Greene's deft and nimble hand make the story itself a guiltless pleasure to read.
Denver Post
What seems to be a deceptively simple story about the headmaster of a New England boarding school and his wife, facing late middle age and growing apart over a difference of opinion about their teenage son, morphed into a haunting, mysterious page-turner… A meditation on longing in all of life’s stages, a literary mystery, and a novel with much for book clubs to untangle.
Concord Monitor
A tightly woven, atmospheric thriller about a New England academic whose life goes off the rails.
People
Thomas Christopher Greene’s haunting tale tracks the unraveling of a marriage. It starts, eerily, with a naked man’s arrest in New York City’s Central Park, then twists back in time through love, grief, betrayal, and love again.
Good Housekeeping
Nothing is what it appears in this brilliant story of a life gone awry.... Arthur Winthrop, headmaster of the Vermont-based Lancaster School, is found wandering around naked in snow-covered Central Park in New York City.... [The story is] about the trajectory of Arthur’s inauspicious marriage.... [A]t its core, a trenchant examination of one family’s terrible loss and how the aftermath of tragedy can make or break a person’s soul.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Greene has created a brilliant, harrowing novel depicting the spectacular unraveling of a once distinguished and proudly successful man. He has also conceived one of the most convincingly drawn unreliable narrators that readers may ever meet, a character recalling the creations of Edgar Allan Poe… This is a riveting psychological novel about loss and the terrible mistakes and compromises one can make in love and marriage. Essential for fans of literary fiction.
Library Journal
Greene’s genre-bending novel of madness and despair evokes both the predatory lasciviousness of Nabokov’s classic, Lolita, and the anxious ambiguity of Gillian Flynn’s contemporary thriller, Gone Girl (2012). —Carol Haggas
Booklist
The first half of Greene's fourth novel unfolds like a conventional academic tale.... [But] the novel takes a wholly unexpected twist, which is then compounded by another, even more surprising one.... Although the puzzle element threatens to overwhelm the narrative, this is a moving testament to the vicissitudes of love and loss, regret and hope.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What did you think were the central themes of the book, and how did they resonate with
you?
2. The novel explores the taboo subject of a teacher—student affair. What did you think of the
author’s handling of this?
3. "Maybe, I think, this is what love is." There are several varieties of love portrayed in the book:
passionate affairs, marriage and parental love. Discuss the depiction of love in all of its
forms.
4. The river is described as "timeless and uncaring." Explore the symbolic resonance of water in
the book and what it means to the characters.
5. How did your opinion of the headmaster and his wife change throughout the course of the
novel? Did you understand them more having encountered both points of view?
6. "Time is malleable. Memory fails. Memory changes." Discuss the representation of time and
memory throughout the pages of the book.
7. What do you think the structure of the novel brought to your reading experience? Did the
narrative switch surprise you?
8. Ethan’s death has a profound effect upon his parents’ lives. Explore the theme of loss and
grief in the book.
9. What did you think of the author’s representation of the boarding-school culture at
Lancaster? Has it altered any of the views you currently hold?
10. Were you satisfied with the ending of the novel? Which character did you sympathize with
most, and why?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)