By Adera Causey
Often we equate rapid cultural change with major social sweeps that affect everyone. But Carolyn Cooke reminds us that while national change, particularly in the latter decades of the 20th century, may have come quickly, individual changes within American subcultures operated at a different pace. This can be seen most profoundly in the lost-in-time subculture of an elite prep school swimming upstream against the tides of the “Daughters of the Revolution.”
The water metaphor here is deliberate as the catalyst for the story is the drowning death of Heck Hellman, a struggling medical student who was not so long ago a prep school scholarship student. Still trying to fit in with his more affluent peers, he goes out on a perilous boating trip offering up the only life jacket to a privileged friend, a decision he would not live to regret.
His death, a perhaps overdrawn metaphor for the abyss between the haves and have-nots also becomes the awakening myth for the narrator, his young daughter EV who serves as the precocious but never precious all-seeing eye, observing the slow-paced changes of her father’s alma mater.
The prep school in question is the Goode School, imaged on the crusty New England model. The school’s long-time headmaster is named Goddard, aptly encouraging others to call him “God,” not so subtly self aggrandizing his institutional legacy. Prideful of his perceived progressivism in allowing a quota base of students of color, he turns a blind eye to the needs of the students once they matriculate, making no moves to bridge the cultural and socioeconomic divide that exist at the school. He justifies this inattention with an insistence that tradition evidences success and that classical rather than socially relevant curricula is the essence of all true learning.