OR: Elisabeth House, by Catherine Thomas, which is what I kept calling this book in my mind. Also sometimes Catherine Thomas, by Elisabeth House. Elisabeth and Catherine are both very lovely saint names that I would totally name a child, and this engendered confusion in my quarantine-fogged mind.
Ines has gotten a second chance in the form of acceptance to Catherine House, a nontraditional, highly exclusive private university with a specialty in the mysterious “new materials.” All tuition, fees, and housing are paid, but students must agree to give themselves up entirely to Catherine House for the three years of their education — contact with the outside world is strictly regulated, and students can’t even access their phones. The longer Ines remains at Catherine House, the more clearly she realizes that something is wrong here, perhaps even that the students are being used in some kind of experiment.
In some senses, Catherine House is a very classic campus novel. Ines is surrounded with people whose personalities, ideas about themselves, and opinions about Catherine House and its mysteries are perpetually shifting. While at first Ines thinks her friend Yaya is straightforwardly a party girl, Yaya becomes a source of solidity and support in later years, doing her best to stay true to her ideals and her friends in a situation designed to separate them. Another friend, Theo, doesn’t interest Ines much until she thinks she can get something out of him; then she comes to truly care for him; then [redacted for spoilers, but I shivered thinking about it]. As you do at college, Ines is constantly searching for herself in the people around her. The reader is never quite sure what kind of person she is, because she’s not certain what kind of person she is. And Catherine House is set up to ensure that she’s perpetually on the back foot, forever questioning her sense of reality as she navigates an institution built on the gaslighting of its students.
Though I didn’t intend it this way, Catherine House makes a fascinating companion read to Megan Gidding’s Lakewood (though with less body horror!). In both books, young women of color become enmeshed in institutions whose intentions are very unclear. Just as Lena is drawn to Lakewood by the promise of a reliable salary and health insurance, Ines comes to Catherine House in the hope of getting a prestigious college degree that would not have been otherwise available to her, with all the privilege such a degree carries with it. The two books are each premised on the idea that the American dream of prosperity and security is a scam designed to reserve itself for the privileged while it preys upon the bodies of the vulnerable and marginalized.
The next paragraph will contain spoilers! You are warned!
As y’all know if you’ve hung around here for a while, I’m always delighted when literary fiction includes speculative elements, as Catherine House does: Though it’s marketed as a Gothic novel for a litfic audience (which is accurate, btw!), it contains SF elements that only become clear towards the end, and Thomas has said that her writing always contains speculative elements — which bodes well for her future career in terms of me enjoying all her books. 😀 If I had to identify what would make me shelve it in litfic rather than SF, it’s the ending, which btw I loved. Rather than giving us a clear resolution to Ines’s three-year battle to understand and reside in Catherine House, Thomas leaves us with uncertainty. Maybe Ines achieves her freedom in the end, or maybe they pull her back in. Thomas leaves it to the reader to decide what we believe, and I loved that.