Sharp’s Debut Novel: A Gen Z Take on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Avigayl Sharp’s debut novel, Offseason, presents the story of an unnamed 28-year-old literature teacher at a girls’ boarding school in the US, who is struggling with various personal challenges. The narrator has lost contact with her friends, is dependent on prescription stimulants, and is emotionally fragile. She also describes herself as sexually uptight, a condition she links to childhood trauma, and harbors an unusual fascination with Joseph Stalin, noting
“his brutality, and his paranoia, reminded me very much of my mother”.
The students at the school are portrayed as brittle and entitled. One pupil comments on Kafka, saying
“This guy Kafka kept acting like everything was out of his control … I thought, why don’t you take a little initiative, buddy?”Another student, after speaking briefly in class,
“let her head drop back against the window, exhausted from the effort of speech”.The pupils show little enthusiasm for reading, which the narrator attributes to
“the devastating psychic effects of daily technological overstimulation”.To challenge them, she assigns Charles Dickens’s 900-page novel, Bleak House.
A Deadpan and Absurd Narrative Voice
Offseason offers a wryly humorous exploration of an enervated mind. The narrative voice is consistently deadpan, often to the point of absurdity, as illustrated by the line
“I am having a series of lucid and penetrating thoughts, I thought.”The novel features intense, one-sided conversations set in mundane situations, reminiscent of Rachel Cusk’s Outline. For example, upon discovering that the school’s handyman is Bulgarian, the narrator, who is of Eastern European Jewish descent, launches into a lengthy reflection on intergenerational trauma. She speculates this might explain her mother’s
“mania for purchasing obscene quantities of designer purses on clearance … then forcing me to observe and praise each one in exaggerated terms, after which she would narrow her eyes and accuse me of wanting her to die so I could have all of the purses”.
Family Dynamics and Unreliable Memories
The complex mother-daughter relationship is further explored when the narrator visits her parents during the end-of-term break, which lends the novel its title. Their interactions are marked by awkwardness that reveals her mother’s difficult nature. The narrator also discloses her own history as a compulsive liar in childhood, suggesting that her memories may not be entirely reliable. Meanwhile, her father comments:
“Jewish people like your mother have intolerable histories, due to the Holocaust, fleeing the Soviet Union for the nation of Israel, cruel parents, estranged sisters, and other miscellaneous factors.”
This statement gently satirizes a literary tradition that examines the intersection of personal neurosis and collective history. Sharp’s novel aligns with works such as Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Katharina Volckmer’s The Appointment, and Will Self’s Quantity Theory of Morality. The protagonist is neurotic and obsessively analyzes the causes of her condition, often bringing these concerns into the classroom, much to the confusion of her students. She writes on the whiteboard
“Trauma Olympics – what if good?”Yet, she never fully embraces the intellectual frameworks she references, expressing more clarity when speaking plainly:
“My parents did not have intimate friendships, due to their limited attention spans and terrible personalities”.
Skewering Literary Tropes with Wit
The novel suggests that some maladjustments may remain inexplicable, and that the diverse and peculiar ways they manifest can be more engaging than their origins. Offseason critiques several common tropes in contemporary literary fiction with sharp wit: the complacency of trauma narratives, the sentimentalism of immigrant stories, the narcissism of autofiction, and the prioritization of theme over texture.
Sharp’s frazzled narrator can be seen as a 21st-century, less confident version of Muriel Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie. Unlike Brodie, she holds a temporary contract and lacks conviction, preferring to indulge in comic bathos. Her situation reflects the challenges facing the humanities today, which are under pressure from funding cuts, culture wars, and distractions like smartphones. In this context, teaching American teenagers about Dickens’s London can feel like a Sisyphean task. One student even asks,
“Is fog going to be on the exam?”
A Narrative of Futility and Fun
The novel’s narrative arc mirrors this sense of futility, culminating in an elliptical anticlimax. However, the journey itself is entertaining, making the destination less significant. Offseason thus offers a humorous and insightful portrayal of a teacher’s fraught mental state and the broader cultural challenges surrounding education and literature.
