Sophie Gee

And there's something about schools that exposes these really entrenched and immovable narratives about sort of class hierarchy, I think.

Well, not by the 20th century.

I mean, it is literally like Tom Brown's School Days.

It's got that same quality of complete celebration and uncritical embracing of what the school stands for.

Yeah, I really, really like that point.

And I was thinking about the fact that obviously this woman who is a, you know, a solid but not extraordinary contemporary writer, Curtis Sittenfeld, would be completely thrilled to know that her book was being compared to The Great Gatsby, to Moby Dick, to 1984.

I mean, these are like some of the greatest masterpieces of world literature.

And I was sort of thinking, why are we making these kind of gestures to compare this perfectly good school story to these amazing masterpieces?

And I think it's something about, and this goes to the heart of the series, of our series on school stories.

There's something about the school story that is constantly gesturing at something bigger and better and more important and more meaningful, more momentous.

than the setting itself, than the contained world that it's describing.

And it's always what's fascinating about school.

Small things are happening, but they seem to mean big things.

Young people are doing things, but they seem to be connected to their older selves who are ultimately gonna kind of rule the world.

And I think this is the fascination of the school story

It's the paradox of the school story that they're actually very powerless, but that they seem powerful.

And it's kind of what gives them a bit of bite in a literary sense, because they are obviously almost by definition, very small stories.

They're almost miniatures of these big forms of novels.

and yet they're constantly straining at their boundaries.

And I think that that's coming up a lot.