Book Review: "In the Fall They Come Back" by Richard Bausch

Ben Jameson is fresh out of graduate school when he lands a teaching job at a small private school in Northern Virginia, Glenn Acres Preparatory Academy. It doesn't matter that he didn't pursue education as a course of study while in college, and never really thought of himself as a teacher—the school needs an English teacher and he needs a job. He doesn't think this is what he'll want to do for the rest of his life, but he's fine with that.

He finds the atmosphere at Glenn Acres a little unorthodox, but that doesn't bother him, because his teaching methods aren't quite by the book, either. (At one point the head of the school has to remind him that he needs actual lesson plans, because the state mandates students learn some specific things, not just participate in discussions about writing.) Ben is tremendously idealistic, it's not long before he thinks this job may be a noble calling of sorts, one that will allow him to make a difference in young people's lives.

When Ben is told by his colleagues that one of his students is being physically abused, and encouraged to watch over him, Ben cannot sit idly by and allow this to continue to happen. Even though his colleagues tried unsuccessfully to intervene in the past, Ben believes he must get involved and he must save this boy. Instead of helping, he makes even more of a mess of the situation, causing trouble for the school, and causing him to have to act contrary to what he feels he should do if he has any hope of keeping his job and keeping the student in school.

This idealism happens a few more times for Ben, once in the case of a withdrawn, mute, and psychologically damaged student, and another time in dealing with a precocious troublemaker who is over 18, but is bound and determined to graduate anyway, even if she hasn't to date. In each case, Ben feels compelled to do the right thing, even if he has no idea what the right thing really is, and even if his blundering actually makes things worse rather than better.

"This is not a story about teaching. Nor is it about education, or school, although most of what happened started in a school. This is a story about caring a little too much; or maybe about not caring enough. I really don't know which. The only thing I know for certain is that I wish a lot of it did not happen."

Reading other people's reviews of Richard Bausch's In the Fall They Come Back leads me to wonder if I completely missed the point of the book, because I really didn't like this at all. While I saw the point he was trying to make relative to the fact that the best of intentions is often not enough to change things the way we want to, and how idealism can sometimes be a harmful thing, I found much of this book tremendously predictable, and many instances in which if people had just said what they meant, or what needed to be said, chaos in some cases might be avoided.

I also found the description of the school and its administration to be very far-fetched; while this private school might not have had to hew to all of the same rules and regulations public schools did, I found it hard to believe that a school which allowed two aged dogs to do their business in classrooms would actually be able to operate. I found many of the characters to be unlikable, even the main character, whom you just couldn't believe could be so stupid over and over again, yet his desire to give, to make a difference, blinds him.

Bausch is a storyteller with a strong body of work, yet I found this book to be one of his weakest, plus it runs far longer than it should. However, since many other reviewers have loved this book, you may want to see if you hew closer to their opinions than mine, which might be the mark of a clueless reader rather than an astute one.

NetGalley and Bloomsbury USA provided me an advance copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review. Thanks for making this available!