I’m here for the workplace novel

Faculty Lounge, Jennifer Mathieu

I recently attended Houston author Jennifer Mathieu’s event for her (first) adult novel Faculty Lounge (after seven YA titles). I wanted to support a local author doing a local thing. The event was excellent. I bought a book and had it signed to my sister who is a curriculum director.

Faculty Lounge is set in the fictional Baldwin High School. (Mathieu is a longt

ime English teacher.) Because my mom began her career teaching high school, I logged many, many hours in my under ten years experimenting with school supplies, racing rolling chairs down hallways, and — by far my favorite — claiming dibs on the good stuff during locker cleanout on the first day of summer. Warm copies fresh off a Xerox machine will always have a special place in my heart.

The book opens — not a spoiler — with a former teacher, now returned as a substitute, having died in his sleep in the teacher’s lounge. This sets off a chain of events (Mathieu does not back down from the cringe) that, together with the cadence of the school year, provide the momentum for the novel. Mathieu mentioned the novel started as a collection of short stories. Each chapter is told from the perspective of a different staff member, which means the narrative spans generations of teachers. The reader gets perspectives from a longtime teacher who met Mr. Lehrer (clever! That’s German for teacher) when she started out herself, from staff members approaching retirement, from the first-year teacher who discovered him in the lounge, among others.

Three more workplace favorites: People in Glass Houses (Shirley Hazzard), Then We Came To The End (Joshua Ferris), Several People are Typing (Calvin Kasulke)

Faculty Lounge delivers as a compelling workplace novel. Mathieu captures the absurd features of any workplace and layers in what’s unique to a high school setting.

At the event, I asked if Mathieu knew of other novels set in high schools. She directed me to Bel Kaufman’s 1964 Up the Down Staircase, which according to the inside flap sold more than 6 million copies and was on the bestseller list for over a year. It’s worth hunting down for the preface to the 1988 edition. Kaufman writes about being invited by her publisher to an “Obscenity Conference,” during which editors kept reminding her that “we are also an educational publisher” and offered toned down insults that could be carved into auditorium chairs by high school students in her book instead. She declined the changes, but agreed to an intentional misspelling of the f-word.

Tell me, what’s your favorite workplace novel? Do you know another adult novel set in a high school?

Happy reading.

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https://thebuzzmagazines.com/articles/2024/07/author-qa-houstonian-jennifer-mathieu

Bookshop link to Faculty Lounge

https://www.jennifermathieu.com/my-books