'The Illness Lesson': Birds and feminine ideas take flight

The tide of feminine anger that flows through Clare Beams’ arresting, beautifully written debut novel "The Illness Lesson" is as fierce and unexpected as the strange, blood-red birds that have migrated to the small Massachusetts farm where Caroline Hood and her father, Samuel, live. The birds are savage and unafraid, the “size of a dove, the shape of a crow, and a brazen crimson tip to tail feathers, the shade a cardinal might bloom to if dipped in wine.”

Caroline’s anger is less flamboyant: It lies buried beneath layers of habit, civility and expectation. But it’s the force that drives this haunting psychological thriller about society’s preoccupation with controlling women’s minds and bodies, a topic that remains familiar here and now.

The birds appeared at the Hood farm once before, 25 years earlier, when Caroline was 4. Her mother, taken by their color, called them “trilling hearts.” Caroline was afraid of their barbarity, nervous when she would watch a bird “chopping up a worm with its brutal beak."

Back then, her father — a famous essayist and progressive thinker — ran the farm as the Birch Hill Consociation, a group of like-minded individuals who lived and worked together hoping to create a more enlightened world. Now, though, the grand experiment has failed, abandoned after a hard winter (and other, more human failures). Caroline’s mother is dead, and so is Miles Pearson, one of Samuel’s acolytes, who published a scandalous fictional account of his time at Birch Hill that paints Caroline’s parents in an unflattering light.

In the wake of this humiliation, Caroline and her father have mostly kept to themselves. They live a contemplative life, until the return of the trilling hearts inspires Samuel to a lofty new goal: They will open a school for girls and transform them, not by drilling them in ladylike virtues as is the fashion but challenging their minds as if they were men.

“We’ll be filling a hole in the educational landscape,” Samuel tells Caroline. “No one, no one, has done this before. Formed girls into women who can become their own best selves, who can be true partners to their husbands and true mothers to their children. Our school will be a pursuit of the divine in the human. We’ll teach thinking, not sewing or physical graces, not shallow parlor-trick erudition.”

Caroline is skeptical, but her father’s enthusiasm is echoed by David, his latest apprentice, and Caroline is not immune to the pull of desire and a need for David’s approval. She agrees to teach, knowing that though she was “meant to be a walking embodiment of the school’s aims, that didn’t mean her feminine fingers belonged in its meatier pies.”

Is it retaliation for this fact that she agrees to admit Eliza, teenage daughter of Miles Pearson, to the school? Maybe. Nothing happens randomly in “The Illness Lesson.” Beams is an intelligent and meticulous writer, and Caroline is not unaware of the potential problem she’s unleashing.

Sly and obsequious, Eliza proves disruptive to Samuel’s dream, leading the other girls on strange midnight forays into the woods and pressing her father’s book on them. More troubling are the rashes and fits that soon befall all of the students. Samuel’s solution to their troubles is horrifying, forcing Caroline to make a choice: Should she rescue the girls and close the school when doubters will use the result to point out women can’t be educated? Does her loyalty lie with her father or the troubled young women?

Beams — who penned the story collection “We Show What We Have Learned,” a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the Shirley Jackson Award — excels at creating atmosphere and building a palpable sense of dread. The suspense of “The Illness Lesson” is twofold. How will powerful men contend with what they think of as the hysteria of women? And can Caroline stop a course of action she knows is exploitive, especially once it’s turned against her?

Beams pits masculine arrogance against feminine rebellion in artful ways, illustrating how easily good intentions can be wielded as a tool for oppression. She invests us deeply in Caroline’s warring loyalties — to her father, to the students, to herself. Even more impressive is her skill at making her persuasive social commentary secondary to her unnerving ability to tell a good story.