Word: queenly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...textbook. Her parents were never physical with their child...they were never physical with one another...they never yelled, but "Silence was the weapon" in their household. Jane feels perpetually inferior to them. Estranged from her identity, haunted by her parent's expectations, rejected by medical schools, Queen's is the only alternative for her. There, in a small community of desperate students, over the course of a long first year of heat and studying, Jane begins to change. She becomes detached from herself, mechanically enduring the labors of classwork while her personality (finally freed from her parents' over-whelming...
...insubstantial, so suppressed by its own struggle to define itself that Jane never appears to us as a real person. This is the novel's greatest setback: it doesn't manage to outgrow its fairy tale from. We have the castle, the king and the queen. We have the princess who doesn't fit into her role, who pretends to an identity of her own, who steps out of line. We have a sort of conflict, a sort of quest, and eventually our princes resolves to achieve 'success,' which is defined as eventually assuming the same as that...
...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...
Teen movies through the decades have alternately embraced, lamented and spoofed this version of social hierarchical hell. The evil jocks and catty girls of Carrie got theirs in the end when good old outcast Carrie set them aflame at the Prom. The "diverse" group of a prom queen, geek, jock, basket case and criminal in The Breakfast Club learned the warm, fuzzy lesson that they can all be friends despite their social differences. And of course there is the ultimate in teen popularity movies, the brilliant Clueless, which mercilessly satirized ultra-rich Valley Girls and the high school scene...