In Brian Platzer’s memorably moving novel, The Optimists, a retired eighth grade English teacher at a Manhattan private school recounts the exploits of his most promising student, Clara Hightower. “I’ve chosen to tell Clara’s story because I don’t know how to explain my own,” Mr. Keating admits.
Keating called his classroom “Ember Land” and remembers his years of pedagogy fondly as a form of magic: “I used to be able to enchant fourteen-year-olds into a mastery of composition and grammar.” His chronicle weaves through time in brief chapters, from the late 1980s, when he meets 5-year-old Clara at the birthday party of a colleague’s son, through the beginning of the 2020s. In the latter time, he contemplates life from his wheelchair due to a stroke that has left him unable to speak or read, although his mind remains sharp. Keating’s wife, Caroline, “plausibly but unjustly” blames the stroke on Clara—a mystery that isn’t explained until much later. Clara has always been a force, beginning as a kindergarten thief who draws Keating’s loyalty, then becoming an adult so accomplished that she “would change in unforeseeable ways the fabric of our whole, confusing, doomed postmodern world.” Keating’s desire to protect Clara keeps the stakes high from start to finish, propelling the book forward, while his keen observations and Platzer’s wonderfully woven narrative often entice readers to linger.
Platzer knows his subject deeply because his protagonist is based on his own beloved seventh and eighth grade English teacher, Rod Keating. Platzer now teaches 8th and 12th grade English at the very school he once attended, while also working as an educational consultant and author (he penned two previous novels, Bed-Stuy Is Burning and The Body Politic). This third novel is a love letter to the ways that students and teachers often change each other’s lives. Like any great instructor, Keating manages to constantly entertain and teach through his narration, including jokes of all kinds, while commenting from time to time on educational inequities, poverty, parenting, the 2008 financial crisis, the Bernie Madoff scandal, the nature of memory and the art of fiction.
The Optimists is a virtuoso performance that may very well prompt readers to get in touch with their own favorite teachers.
