Customer Reviews
The negative reviews are bizarre 
2008-06-05
I picked this up at the library and read it over 4 days. It's an entertaining story that alternates between a young teacher in a prep school and the son of the headmaster as they cope with the pressures of prep school life and of the radical headmaster. There's nothing particularly deep about it, but the writing is not bad and I had only good feelings about reading it. It's not really a 5 star book, but it's closer to 5 than 4 in my estimation, at least compared to most books I come across.
I don't really understand the negative reviews -- folks seem ticked off at how the book was marketed, which is really odd. (It isn't as though the author normally has any control over that.) The book certainly isn't in the same league as "A Separate Peace", but it's a good debut novel.
A fine novel that just happens to be set at a prep school. . . 2008-03-08
I can't understand some of the negative reviews here. True, like many excellent novels, The Headmaster Ritual takes some time to get into. But once you do, the rewards are ample. Instead of exploring the potentially lurid social life of prep school students and teachers, Antrim opens a window into their inner-lives and humanity and the personal struggles that fuel their feelings. This is deftly wrapped into a somewhat zany Tom Wolfe-esque plot involving of all things--the international politics of North Korea. Antrim writes with subtlety and restraint, never reaching for too much in a scene. His characters and action are always believable, and he avoids the sensational and gratuitous. This is an ambitious novel written with a masterly touch. If you give it time, you'll come to know the characters with fullness and feel for them, and you won't want to put the book down.
Bad book, bad writer, very bad dust jacket 
2007-10-15
I've always appreciated well-written school stories so when I saw the dust jacket cover comments on this book, I was excited about this wonderful new writer. When I finally received the media-mailed book from an Amazon seller, I was immediately disappointed to meet its relatively unlikable protagonist in a story that was so tangential as to crush any serious drive the book had going for it. Knowing that my mood will occasionally clash with a good book, I put it down for a month. After picking it up again, I felt the same and still couldn't climb in. I'm not a reviewer, but am an avid reader of fiction and historical non-fiction. I believe that my views on this will coincide with other 30-somethings who went through prep school in New England. By the way, the artwork on the cover is lop-sided as was, in my view, the pre-publication bull**** that raved about this book. I'll rarely trust a dust jacket again.
Rather Boring 2007-10-07
I have to question if those who reviewed the book read it -- or if they have ever read the classics to which it was compared. Either way, this was a rather boring, clichéd book that had little depth, excitement, or accuracy with regard to prep school life or the lives of students. I kept reading with the hope that the plot would improve--no such luck. I put The Headmaster Ritual onto the shelf thinking "what a waste of time reading that dribble."
Not a classic, the publisher blurb tells you what it wishes it were 
2007-09-01
Its supposedly grand themes: absent fathers, making your way for yourself, gritty conflict (at personal and international levels), political ideology gone mad. True the book has these elements. I'm not sure I'd really call them themes since they pop in and out here and there as is convenient. They don't particularly parallel or reinforce each other into any particularly profound or coherent whole. They're just scattered about and the publisher's description wants us to think they're more meaningful than they are.
On the plus side the writing is often lively and with interesting details. The reading is detailed and somewhat addictive. The author succeeds in defining a mood for the boarding school, creating tension and making us want to find out what is going on.
I agree with other reviewers that the author is trying to portray a dark, supposedly "realistic" side to things that is supposed to be more profound than it actually is. This isn't Catcher in the Rye or Lord of the Flies, though. The power struggles, the bungled sexual desires and conquests make me think it should've been headier than it actually turns out to be.
It's very detail-rich, which is good at times, but less good at other times. Details to give realism are nice, but the author sometimes gives names and large paragraphs to characters that are relatively to completely unimportant (and are never seen again in any meaningful ways). There are too many characters introduced within the first 100 pages with few cues about which will later turn out to be important and which unimportant.
The book is a nice effort. I wanted to find out what happened and continued reading. The book was enjoyable, though perhaps needed some tightening and finesse.
Oh, by the way, if you go in expecting a dark comedy you'll be disappointed. It's not so much comedic as dark.
Trenchant, Funny, and Lucidly Written 2007-08-15
Taylor Antrim's debut novel is a darkly comic, clear-eyed look at hidden worlds whose complexities and rules can be understood only from inside: the insular hothouse of boarding school, the thorny dynamics between father and son, and the self-delusion of blind ideological commitment.
Dyer Martin, a new history teacher at the prestigious Britton School, arrives in the fall ready to close the door on the failures and disappointments of his past: a disastrous first job, a broken relationship, and acute uncertainty about his future. James, a lonely senior, just wants to make it through his last year unscathed, avoiding both the brutal hazing of dorm life and the stern and unforgiving eye of his father, the school's politically radical headmaster, Edward Wolfe.
Soon, however, both Dyer and James are inescapably drawn into Wolfe's hidden agenda for Britton, as the headmaster orders Dyer to set up and run a Model UN Club for students. As the United States moves steadily toward a conflict with an increasingly hostile North Korea -- whose pursuit of nuclear technology is pushing the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon -- Wolfe's political fervor begins to consume him, and he sets in motion a plan that will jeopardize his job, his school, and even the life of his own son.
With precisely controlled, deceptively subtle storytelling, The Headmaster Ritual is an insightful and captivating examination of the halting, complicated course young men must chart to shake off the influence of fathers -- and father figures -- while refining their convictions about the world and their place in it.
One of the best books I've read in 3+ years 2007-08-07
As someone who reads 200+ books a year, I know my way a little around literary works.
"The Headmaster Ritual" by Taylor Antrim is by far one of the best books I've read in quite some period of time. I read this book in the same week I read Night Watch and On Beauty I found this book the most intriguing and found myself identifying with this book in more ways then one. (I enjoyed it so much, that afer I picked it up, I didn't put it down until I finished it.)
I find throughout the book that Antrim uses imagery and references from books such as the Tao Te Ching, 25th-Anniversary Edition and true facts about North Korea, this book is not simply about a boarding school, it is about life, and about the current situation between the United Stares and North Korea.
This book is a worthwhile read as it will help you identify more with foreign countries (and possible with your own country as well!).
Additionally, it paints a true story of what life feels like, and he captures the emotions of the characters well, seeming to bring them to life, as the reader feels that he lives through them. As Stephen King once said "The objective of the writer is to make the reader forget that they are reading." Taylor Antrim does this amazingly well and I look forward to more of his work.
A failure 2007-07-21
The Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock once wrote about someone who didn't know what he was doing, "He got on his horse and rode off in all directions." The same could be said for Antrim's novel. What do we have here-- a bildungsroman a la CATCHER IN THE RYE where a naif stumbles his way towards some kind of illumination or redemption? Nope. Well sort of. No, not really... A satire of all the awful people and nasty little things that go on daily at those written-about-to-death New England prep schools; a kind of updated "Decline and Fall"? Nope. I could go on, but I'd just say nope to all of them. As one major newspaper review of this book so succinctly put it, "Nothing in 'The Headmaster's Ritual' is new." It is a very obvious first novel that strains to say a lot but ends up saying almost nothing, archly. Its flashes of humor or good writing are overshadowed constantly by flatness and characters/ situations you know could never exist the way they have been described.
Puerile Pulp 
2007-07-11
Quick plot summary: Fired from his sales job in LA, Dyer Martin heads east and lands a teaching position at a toney Philips Andover-like prep school where the story picks up. His universe becomes one of jocks & nerds. This age old precept carries the story with the bookish son of Headmaster Wolfe enduring teenage angst throughout the 300 pages. Professor Martin falls for a fellow faculty member, but she has some cloudy romantic past; the bookish son falls for pretty Jane, but Jane loves jocks. Angry Headmaster Wolfe, whose wife left him to go build nukes for the coming war on the Korean peninsula, is bent on his own secret mission of partnering with shady operatives from the Democratic People's Republic. Of Korea? Of Cambridge, MA? We can't be sure. The novel climaxes with the students participating in a model United Nations Conference in NYC. Sort of Jocks & Jills meet Guns & Butter.
Antrim is a good writer, and strings together very good descriptions of the prep school setting, homes in Boston & Knoxville, and especially New York City street scenes. But, A SEPARATE PEACE this is not. Similarly, anyone looking for a humorous read, (because it is promoted heavily by Christopher Buckley,) will be as disappointed as I.
I enjoyed it 2007-07-10
I don't understand the negative reviews. I really enjoyed this story and look forward to future works from the author. I think these reviews are particularly harsh and usually I do not comment on the opinion of other people.
