'Catherine House': Feeling physically and emotionally trapped in school

Catherine House" is the debut novel by Elisabeth Thomas. Credit: Custom House
CATHERINE HOUSE by Elisabeth Thomas (Custome House, 320 pp., $27.99)
Houses can be welcoming or forbidding; they might express their owners or oppress them. Sometimes they imprison or haunt or even inhabit their inhabitants. Catherine House does a little of all these things.
Elisabeth Thomas' debut novel, also called "Catherine House," is about an exclusive private university, but you might say it's also about an experiment in social distancing: Here it's done among one group of students and faculty over a period of three years. The outside world is kept at arm's length, although, as it turns out, the sickness is inside the house.
Like most of her classmates, Ines is on the run from her own demons and regrets. She barely passed high school after getting pulled into a spiral of drugs, parties and dissipation. After consulting with a trusted adviser, Ines applies to Catherine House in an act of desperation.
It's an extraordinary privilege to be accepted to the school. Politicians, judges, artists and presidents have passed through its halls. Its gracious, historic campus provides students with every need — food, board and books. And tuition is free.
The exchange rate is steep, however. Incoming students must agree to cut off all ties with their previous lives. There are no trips home and no visitors. Not even keepsakes or little mementos are allowed.
A meditation runs through the novel on the significance of individualism and free thought. Ines flaunts the rules almost immediately when she helps her roommate Baby hide a snail in their room. This small, subversive act aligns the two girls against the establishment, but they have no idea what they're up against. The school entices the most vulnerable sorts of young people, preying on their insecurities. Ines, who was brought up by an indifferent, indolent mother, craves the shelter of a family, and that is ostensibly what Catherine House seems to offer.
With its cultlike fixation on control and secrecy, it's clear from the outset that something is deeply wrong with Catherine House. The narrative feels haunted by a sense of decay and fear. Ines is frightened by the mess of her own past and lulled by the sense of structure and hope that the school represents. Catherine House paints itself as a new kind of family home, along with a fun house mirror simulation of a "family."
At times, the narrative stretches a bit thin, repeating certain motifs as the characters roam the halls, entering one mysterious room after another. But the novel compensates for redundancy with some wonderfully horrific and truly shocking discoveries within these locked antechambers. There are shades of Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock as suspense builds in the winding corridors of the house and the twisting turns of the psyche.
We root for Ines as she tracks the dark mysteries, pulled between her dream of home and her desire for freedom. The question is whether she'll be able to fledge from this dysfunctional nest or be smothered by it.
It may be that there's no place like home, but as "Catherine House" makes clear, sometimes that's a good thing.
Most Popular
Top Stories





