Life Outside the Classroom: Teachers in Fiction

This time of year when all of the city's children are adjusting to a new school year routine, it can be easy to think of teachers as only that… teachers. As if they exist only in the classroom, controlling unruly students and imparting wisdom, knee deep in grade books, lesson plans and homework assignments. Lucky for us, there's some great recent fiction that reminds us that teachers have full, complex lives outside of school. The role of the honorable occupation varies in the following books, but they all feature a central character who is a teacher.

Matthew Quick's latest novel is Love May Fail. Told from multiple perspectives, this offbeat and thoughtful novel centers on Portia, who has just left her pornographer husband and their lavish Florida lifestyle. She returns to her Jersey girl roots and her hoarder mother's home and embarks on a quest to save the man who once saved her—Mr. Vernon, an inspiring teacher from her high school years.

Olive Kitteridge shows us the small town of Crosby, Maine in these 13 connected stories by Elizabeth Strout. Olive, a retired math teacher, sometimes plays only a supporting role, but through Olive's life and relationships with her kind husband, her son and other townspeople, Strout shows the loneliness and despair that is an undercurrent of "ordinary" life. The book was also made into a mini-series.

Marisha Pessl structured her debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, like a syllabus for a literature class, with each chapter named after a classic work; it's a fitting structure for this brainy coming of age/mystery hybrid. Blue van Meer starts her senior year at a new school and quickly gets singled out by her intriguing film studies teacher, Hannah, and her group of student-followers. Blue and her new friends soon find themselves in the middle of a mystery after witnessing a drowning when they sneak into a party at Hannah's.

Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs dives into the stereotype of the kind, self-sacrificing female teacher. Nora, a third-grade teacher in Boston, has always secretly wanted to be an artist. She gets involved with the worldly Shahid family, a new student and his academic father and artist mother.  She starts down the road of realizing her artistic ambitions, but a betrayal leaves her angry and obsessed. This book was awarded by the New York Times and ALA and is compelling and deep.