The Hour Between
by Sebastian Stuart
Alyson Books. 248 pages, $14.95
THE HOUR BETWEEN turned into several hours of guilty pleasure. Sebastian Stuart’s coming-of-age story, set in a private, residential high school, brings together Arthur and Katrina, the Will and Grace of secondary education. (He’s gay and she’s flighty.) Their maturing process is set against the battle of administrators at the school.
Katrina Felt is the daughter of Morris Felt, an Academy-Award winning composer, and Jean Clarke, a glamorous movie star. Arthur MacDougal is the gay son of nobodies. They meet in their senior year at Spooner School, an institution with roots in Christian Science. Arthur is attending Spooner because he was kicked out of another school. Having seen a production of The Glass Menagerie, he’d lived his life as Laura—i.e., cutting school and instead going to the movies to spend his day with his favorite screen heroes. His parents were forced to send him to any school that would accept him. That was Spooner. Katrina, whose parents are more focused on their brilliant careers, is in storage at Spooner. She’s too much for either parent to handle, and something unpleasant seems to have happened at the last school she attended.
Mr. Edward Spooner, described by a student as “the original space cadet,” is an anything-goes headmaster who wants the students to experience life, with the classroom as an opening into the adult world. Spooner is opposed by forces that want organized classes and something resembling a curriculum. Enter Mr. and Mrs. Tupper, the dorm parents for the men’s dorm. He teaches classes and leads the opposition to Spooner’s permissive approach to education. Along with some faculty members, these administrators are the low characters in the novel, objects of the students’ ongoing ridicule.
As the year progresses, the faculty battles become more intense. But, the students have an exciting life. Katrina auditions for a Broadway show and gets the lead. Cecil Beaton comes to Spooner to photograph Katrina for Vogue. She becomes the darling of New York and, of course, of Spooner. Katrina’s relationship with Arthur becomes more familiar but never physically intimate. Still, most of us could only wish for a best friend who cared as much for us as Katrina and Arthur do for each other.
As a high school senior, Katrina has experienced too much of the dark side of life. She stocks her dorm room with Dom Perignon and gin, and carries a flask of booze with her at all times. But her past follows her to Spooner. Curtis, someone from her past, shows up unannounced. He has a job as a veterinarian’s assistant and has an apartment, and thinks it’s time for Katrina to move in with him. After Curtis appears on the scene, Stuart hurries the story though graduation. The characters we’ve followed go their separate ways to different universities—except Katrina, who disappears.
Stuart has created a pleasant enough reading experience, with characters as interesting as high school students are wont to be. The sections dealing with Jean Clarke and her celebrity friends bring to mind the articles in People magazine or segments of Entertainment Tonight. The novel reads like the script for a Liza Minnelli movie, especially Katrina’s lines. And it’s easy to see in your mind’s eye a young Liza playing Katrina in the movie, with Dudley Moore, perhaps, playing Arthur (again). The Hour Between, whose title refers to the period between adolescence and adulthood, is a breezy book that would make for great beach reading next summer.
David Ritchey teaches communications at the University of Akron.
