Word: jonahs
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...fall of 1995, Handley said that of the 13 junior Faculty members who were then part of the department, only one would remain after he leaves. Within the past several weeks alone, three junior Faculty members in the English department--Ann Pellegrini '86, Joshua "Jed" D. Esty and Jonah Siegel--announced their intent to accept tenure-track positions at other universities...
SWIMMING WITH JONAH...
Audrey Schulman's second novel, Swimming with Jonah is about Jane Guy, "the awkward, insecure child of a world renowned physician and a beautiful Bostonian ballerina" who goes to attend Queen's Medical School on a tiny Indonesian island. Queen's is the last chance for extremely wealthy students who have failed to get into any medical school. Tuition is the only requirement for acceptance. Isolated and outside the jurisdiction of American law, Queen's is "the boot camp of medical schools," motivating its students by any means necessary--namely bullying and psychological abuse. According to the publicist, thrust into...
...this point, you may be wondering why this novel is called Swimming with Jonah. At Queen's, Jane meets a second year student called Keefer. Keefer is "bony as a bird," a gaunt, nervous man with an uncontrollable stutter. Having flunked one of his first-year classes, Keefer is marked out by the teachers as a failure and tortured more than anyone else. His only solace is Johan, a partially tame shark he keeps in a sea-pen not far from his cabin. Schulman attempts to use Jonah as a sort a of underpinning for this section of the novel...
This is the greatest tragedy of Swimming with Jonah: in Keefer, Schulman creates a character at once interesting and real. He is the most arresting and human character in the book, but Schulman never allows him to develop fully, nor does she really explore Keefer's relationship with Jane. In the end she sacrifices him in a meaningless and predictable suicide in order to bring closure to the book and to propel Jane, a protagonist we can never like...