“The Rehearsal” by Eleanor Catton – In Praise of Maximalism

“The Rehearsal” by Eleanor Catton (2008) – 309 pages

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“The Rehearsal” breaks every rule of literary minimalism along its merry and harrowing way, and that is a good thing. 

 We’ve all read minimalist novels.  In them the sentences are short and laconic.  The number of characters is kept to a classic few.  The dialogue cannot be profound or witty, because people don’t naturally talk that way.  The sentences themselves have little variety of structure just like the ones I’m using to describe minimalism.  When finally a small epiphany does occur in the minimalist novel, it glows brightly across the dull flat surface of the rest of the book.

 “The Rehearsal” flaunts these rules of minimalism.  Perhaps it is because Eleanor Catton is from New Zealand, far from the United States which is the home of minimalists such as Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, Ann Beattie, Richard Ford, and many others.  Perhaps it is because Eleanor Catton was only 22 years old when “The Rehearsal” was published. Take the following lines of dialogue which would never show up in a minimalist novel or story.

 “The clarinet is tadpole to the sax, can you see that?  The clarinet is a black and silver sperm, and if you love this sperm very much it will one day grow into a saxophone.” 

 This is spoken by one of the main characters of the novel known only as the saxophone teacher. The over-the-top profound and witty dialogue of “The Rehearsal” was the first thing that struck me.   Of course people rarely talk this way in real life, so the dialogue here comes across as extravagant and fabricated.  However I find this dialogue refreshing, because it is thought-provoking and interesting in its original quirky way.  It reminds me of much of the writing of Oscar Wilde who was always willing to stop the progress of his stories for the sake of an outstanding line.    

 “The Rehearsal” is about school, music, and the theatre. Most of the novel is seen from the point of view of the high school girls and the slightly older theatre group which occupies an adjoining building.  The crucial event of the novel is when one of the male teachers Mr. Saladin is discovered to be carrying on an affair with one of his underage students Victoria.  The theatre group decides to re-enact this affair as their original play for the year.

 Here is one more interesting quote from the novel to give you more of the flavor of “The Rehearsal”.

 “Acting is not about making a copy of something that already exists.  The proscenium arch is not a window.  The stage is not a little three-walled room where life goes on as normal.  Theatre is a concentrate of life as normal.  Theatre is a purified version of real life, an extraction, an essence of human behavior that is stronger and more tragic and more perfect than everything that is ordinary about me and you.” 

 “The Rehearsal” runs out of energy well before the end, and I found myself losing interest during the last third of the novel.  The girl students’ and theatre students’ reactions to the teacher-student affair were unexpected and interesting, but I think they could have gone even deeper.  I do see this novel as a noble attempt to write an original novel.

  “The Rehearsal” was long listed for the Orange Prize in 2010 and Amazon’s First Novel Award of 2010.   It must be a heady experience being 22 years old and seeing your novel published all over the world.

 Currently Eleanor Catton is studying at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City, Iowa.  I for one hope she is not learning minimalism.