Jan Review by Madeleine Dunnigan – Secrets of Sex and Adolescence | imaginary

IIt may sound like a familiar novel: a strange coming-of-age story, plotted during one sweltering summer in the 1970s. But from its first paragraphs, this first novel seems different. Madeleine Donegan immediately takes us inside the head of her rather creepy protagonist, and makes his adventures in teenage lust and self-awareness relatable. The writing is constantly surprising, as it is unafraid of sensuality as it is with the story’s frequent brutal outbursts.

We first meet Jin, our eponymous hero, who is about to take his O-levels. He sits them at an unusually late 17; Later, we find out it’s because he has a history of violence, and has been excluded from every school he’s ever attended. To the despair of his teachers, Jan seems completely incapable of learning. He’s also Jewish in a school full of Gentiles, the only child of a single mother, a county-funded scholarship boy, and his friendship group is unanimously blessed with money and privilege. However, this is not the story of a strange outsider struggling to find himself in an environment of dreary conformity. The Jan School, located high on the Sussex Downs, specialized in the education of colored non-conformists; Known among its disciples as The House of Nutters, her system mixes high-stakes bohemianism with an occasional dash of old-school protocol. More importantly, it is isolated, and its students are all male. It’s a classic miniature. A petri dish containing potentially dangerous experiments in masculinity.

Early in the story there are two neat and effective timing tricks. The events take place in the summer of 1976; By setting her narrative through the months when this country and its cultures felt as if they were about to explode, Donegan makes her story rich with larger implications, both personal and political. Because Gene is still trying to achieve something he had to stay away from as a child—his O-levels—his fumbling attempts to control his desires seem realistically out of sync with the freer sexuality of his classmates. Jane experiences these desires as both an aggressive child and a disturbingly adult, and Donegan brilliantly embodies this duality in the shifting registers of her prose. Like Jane’s body, her sentences are exquisitely alive to physical truth; They, like his mind, strive to know what these facts might actually mean.

Jane is clearly a firework waiting to ignite. The spark that ignites his fuse is so small and fleeting that Jan himself almost misses it: a single mysterious look he exchanged with a fellow pupil named Tom. However, it turns out that Tom has been in Jane’s sexual interest for some time, and soon an explosion begins. As the ripples appear, Dunnigan is particularly good at using the slow reveal of the secrets of her novel’s backstory. Death, abandonment, and sexual assault have both educated and abused Jean, and his journey from incoherent lust to self-knowledge is charted in a series of powerfully written scenes. His astonishing first experience of actual sex forms a diptych with the bloody slaughter of a corpse; His most fundamental childhood memory is associated with the systematic destruction of an entire glass house.

Like all good coming-of-age stories, the book has two conflicting narrative impulses: one toward disillusionment and the other toward discovery. Disappointment comes when Tom, the boy with whom Jane has fallen deeply in love, turns out to be a traitor. The betrayal then allows for the retrieval of a lost but crucial childhood memory, a memory that finally explains to the reader and Jean himself his long history of self-sabotage. In the wake of that memory, Dunnigan allows the music of her hero’s inner musings to launch into a major key, bright with the possibility of sunlight. This provides a truly impressive result.

This is an impressive and ingenious start. Jean and his story will speak to any reader struggling to understand themselves as the owner of a queer body in a treacherous world. It will also speak to anyone who can remember how wonderful—and dangerous—it felt one day to find yourself with a fully functioning heart.