FINANCIAL TIMES OF LONDON 12/5/24

Fiction

Pontiac by Jim Schutze — school of hard knocks for a gilded world

By Tomoé Hill

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In the early 1960s, Woodrow Skaggs is offered the opportunity to attend the elite St Philip’s school in New Hampshire as a scholarship boy. Part of a working-class family on the lower rungs of the American dream, he is happy in the diverse chaos of industrial Pontiac, Michigan. But the exoticism and possibility of a new life is too exciting to decline and this impulsive decision becomes the most important one in the making of him.

 

This turning point is the focus of Jim Schutze’s debut novel. An acclaimed American political journalist, Schutze is also the author of several nonfiction books — including The Accommodation, a history of racism in Dallas. Schutze has entered a new terrain with fiction, yet the novel has the hallmarks of a non-fiction mind. Woodrow’s first-person account is told in recollections, dialogue and letters. Like his protagonist’s, Schutze’s own boyhood education took place at a boarding school in New Hampshire(his was called St Paul’s). In the acknowledgments, he stresses “no character in this story is a boy I knew at St Paul’s School, but all of the boys I went to school with are here.” Infused by real experience, Pontiac paints a primal atmosphere beneath the  distinguished reputation of St Philip’s.

Violence is the natural bedfellow of enforced constraint and hierarchy, and it is the main expression of emotion here. Staff and students both participate, at times reluctantly, at others with sadistic relish or pack-like frenzy: “There were no courtly bows in Pontiac. If someone said, ‘good fight’ at the end of a fight, it would start another fight.” Schutze imbues these recollections with a lingering tension and Woodrow’s agitation becomes the reader’s.

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Unsurprisingly, he retains a feeling of alienation, despite brief outbursts of friendship and loyalty among boys brought together at random. As school progresses, Tolstoy’s maxim about unhappy families (“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”) is evident. Parents are neglectful; wealth is sometimes a facade; legacy a millstone; intelligence and sporting prowess not always inherited traits. Woodrow’s own truth is that his brother is in juvenile detention, while his biological father is from a wealthy family, having impregnated Woodrow’s mother while she was employed as a servant. Measured in the value of psychological weight, he is an equal at St Philip’s.

 

Woodrow realises the rules of engagement in a gilded world are constantly shifting. The intricacies of class structure elevate brutality to another sport in the eyes of its participants. The reward for this time served — as a doctor remarks, the culture at St. Philip’s reminds him of the local prison — is understood to be a charmed adulthood, though it transpires that even in such lives it is possible to deviate from their expected endings. Woodrow goes from discomfort at alienation to embracing it as an adult, realising that being out of place brings him back to the familiar; a perverse sense of home.

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Pontiac evokes the voyeuristic psychological styles of Richard Yates, Evan S Connell and Fleur Jaeggy in its unsentimental dissection. Schutze writes in minimalistic prose, capturing emotional detail with a journalistic eye. What warmth exists stands in stark relief, a reminder of its precious rarity. Through Woodrow’s memories, the juxtaposition of empathy and cruelty conjure full and nuanced character studies, rendering Pontiac a beautiful, if at times difficult, telling of a young man’s formative and privileged school days.

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Pontiac by Jim Schutze Deep Vellum £13.99/$18.95, 475 pages

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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024. All rights reserved.

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Tomoé Hill is a US-born, London-based editor and writer whose writing has appeared or will be forthcoming in places such as Financial Times, The Spectator, The Spectator World, New Humanist, Asymptote, Recessed.Space, and Vestoj. She co-wrote a monthly feature as part of the duo XX and XY, reviewing classic erotic literature for Rowan Pelling's The Amorist during its time as a print magazine. Songs for Olympia, a response to The Ribbon at Olympia's Throat by Michel Leiris, was included in Granta's Books of the Year 2023.