IN THE FALL THEY COME BACK by Robert Bausch

I stumbled across In the Fall They Come Back because I'm a fan of the late Robert Bausch's twin brother, Richard Bausch, who writes excellent short stories. It turns out that Robert is no slouch in the fiction department--can you think of any other identical twins in the world of literary fiction? This story focuses on the short, turmolteous teaching career of Ben Jameson, who reluctantly takes on a job at a local private school in rural Virginia called Glenn Acres to pay the bills. We spend two years watching in this young man, who by his own admission has an urge to save troubled people, fall far too deep into the personal problems on his students.

There's a lot to like here--Ben's relationship with Professor Bible, an older colleague who becomes a mentor, contains some of the most touching and realistic writing in the book. Ben begins to see that there's both more and less to Bible than he first imagined. And, unlike other reviews, I liked that Ben's relationship with his students is wince-inducing at times: he fawns far too much over a beautiful student, and the more he insists that he wasn't at all attratced to said student, the more I began to believe that he doth protest too much.

That said, I'll give Bausch the benefit of the doubt that he knew exactly what he was doing with Ben. He's an unreliable first person narrator, honest and defensive in the same paragraph. He wants us to know how much he cared for his students, but bristles at accusations (even from other teachers) that he intervines in his student's lives too much.

Beyond the complex protagonist, some of the book's highlights are the effortless way Bausch captures the feel of each season, which should bring any reader back to his or her time in school. I loved how firmly the book was set in that now hazy pre-Internet past, and how the entire narrative was tinged with melancholic nostalgia. Looking back, it's easy to wish that Bausch had trimmed some of the repetitive rhetorical questions and focused more on the ailing Bible, but overall I think this is an accomplished novel and I can't wait to read more of Robert Bausch. Apparently one of his books inspsired "Almighty Bruce", so the man must be versatile.