Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine.
The dazzling beauty of Paris provides a sensual background for this story of seduction, frustration and the failure to live up to expectations. You Deserve Nothing is Alexander Maksik’s debut novel, and takes what threatens to be a tired storyline – a teacher everyone reveres becoming romantically involved with a student – and renders it with language and detail that makes it raw and mesmerising.
The story unfolds over the course of a year at a prestigious international school for the children of diplomats and business executives. These are students who have been moved around so much that they are worldlier and more jaded than most teenagers, though every bit as lost. The narrative shifts between three different voices – Will, Gilad and Marie -each of which Maksik captures with subtle nuance and authenticity.
Will is one of those teachers we all wish we had – that inspiring, charismatic, rebellious teacher so mythologised in books and movies, who really cares about knowledge and wants to open up minds beyond the narrow confines of the class syllabus. Will leads a small group of senior students in seminars on Satre, Hemingway, Faulkner and Camus, challenging them to apply ideas about life, death, religion and fate to their own lives. Students who have never cared about academics before study obsessively to earn his praise. As Gilad, one of Will’s most devoted admirers, says, “Those many of us who loved him, we did what he asked. And we felt important, we felt wild, we felt like poets and artists, we felt like adults living in the world with books in our hands, with pens, with passions.”
Of course, Will the teacher is as much of a myth as it sounds like. Will the man is already disillusioned with it, as much as he still thrives on it – the phrase “it was all I had” is repeated several times throughout his passages. In his personal life he is weak, aimless, struggling to be an example of what he teaches. He finds himself in a relationship with Marie almost without knowing why. Though Marie is consumed by an unrecognisable passion and yearns for real intimacy, the affair is something that just seems to happen to Will, without much thought or involvement from him.
The chapters told from Marie’s perspective are perhaps the most intriguing. Quietly frustrated, quietly lonely, and sick of following around her obnoxious friend Ariel, Marie is looking for something to change her life. The visceral emotions of adolescence are captured in strikingly simple statements – “She was my best friend. I hated her” – and the terrible flatness and emptiness she feels permeates the novel, filling it with a sense of loneliness that never quite eases, no matter how physically close she gets to Will. “I started to have the impression that I was making love to a ghost or a phantom or something,” she says. “And more than once I felt that I could have been anyone. Anyone at all.”
Maksik’s prose is thought-provoking, and as he weaves philosophical discussions into the text he reaches right down to the heart of the story – the tension between desire and action that simmers beneath the surface. As Will tells his class, “That’s the whole point, right there… the distance between desire and action, between what you want and what you do. That tension, that’s everything.”