Prep-school novels and one that never gets off the ground: Sweet Days of Discipline

Sweet Days of Discipline (1989) - not a tale of bondage or anything of the sort - is a short novel (100 small pages) by Swiss-Italian writer Fleur Jaeggy about her year as a 14-year-old in a Swiss boarding school; the time is never firmly established but seems to be perhaps the 1950s? The novel seems like a mashup of Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and My Brilliant Friend (to which it would be an antecedant), and there are probably a lot more boarding school novels (e.g., Prep, Separate Peace) to constitute a genre unto itself. In this novel the unnamed first-person narrator establishes that there is a caste system or pecking order in the school: Younger girls try to attach themselves to an older student who will be their protector of sorts and in turn the younger girl will perform various services, such as cleaning the room. Sounds like an American prison system, in fact - though in this instance there's not even a hint of sexual favors nor even of physical abuse. In most of the prep-novels the protagonist has a powerful relationship with either fellow student or a teacher; sometimes the relationship is brutal and oppressive, sometimes worshipful and inspirational (sometimes both). Jaeggy does a good job w/ the set-up - the narrator develops a worshipful relationship w/ the top student, a year older and much more "experienced," Frederique, and a contemptuous relationship w/ her German roommate, whom she considers such a nonentity that now, writing in retrospect, she can't even remember the girl's name. Once she's done the set-up, however, FG doesn't bring the novel anywhere; she's a writer who seems indifferent to plot. What happens to these characters, how do the interact and change one another, is there a point of crisis, any violence, misbehavior, anything? I'm now 60 pp in and so far nothing: The teachers and the headmaster are just sketches, there are one or two peripheral characters (an African girl whose father is president of his country and who has become a favorite of the headmistress - but FG makes little of this). There's a bare hint that the German roommate may have had some family connection to the Nazis, but again - so far at least - Jaeggy hasn't playing out this string. Short novels are great - some of my favorite works fall into this form - but if the writer doesn't build in at least a semblance of plot the writer might as well call the work a memoir and be done w/ it. 



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