[b:You Deserve Nothing|9777374|You Deserve Nothing|Alexander Maksik|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1298922349s/9777374.jpg|14667081] is set in a private international high school in Paris (the setting being yet another character in the story), with compelling first-person narrations by two students and their revered English teacher who challenges them to think about their reading in moral and philosophical terms. They try to translate his intellectual messages to their lives and suffer the universal response of teenagers to the disappointments of adulthood as their beloved teacher seems to throw away his livelihood and career in careless, unwary behavior. I read it with total absorption. The following passage about teachers stuck with me:

"The ones who stay are so often some of the most depressing people you've ever met in your life. It has nothing to do with their age. They've stayed because of their dispositions--bitter, bored, lacking in ambition, lonely, and mildly insane....This is what it takes to teach for half a life-time. The ones who care, who love the subjects, who love their students, who love, above all, teaching--they rarely hang around."

Maksik is a gifted writer and I look forward to more of his work. ( )

THE Publisher Says: Set in an international high school in Paris, You Deserve Nothing is told in three voices: that of Will, a charismatic young teacher who brings ideas alive in the classroom in a way that profoundly affects his students; Gilad, one of Will's students who has grown up behind compound walls in places like Dakar and Dubai, and for whom Paris and Will's senior seminar are the first heady tastes of freedom; and Marie, the beautiful, vulnerable senior with whom, unbeknowst to Gilad, Will is having an illicit affair. Utterly compelling, brilliantly written, You Deserve Nothing is a captivating tale about teachers and students, of moral uncertainties and the coming of adulthood. It heralds the arrival of a brilliant new voice in fiction.

I RECEIVED THIS TREE BOOK AS A GIFT. THANK YOU!

My Review: A brief review of my sexual history: I was sexually abued by my mother in my teens; I, in turn, used my youth and physical charms to seduce a man (who was not my teacher and held no authority over me) more than twice my age; I can never repay him for the glory of introducing me to the raptures of consensual sex. So, while I understand coercive sex from the victim's PoV, I also know teens are sexual creatures and fully aware of the power and pleasure of being desired. Sex itself needs no justification, it's just fun as anyone who's had it knows. (Rape is not sex it's abuse of power by bodily means.)

It's the consent part that troubles me here, not the age gap nor the idea that a seventeen-year-old could set out to bed someone more than twice their age. A teacher is in a position of power and a student wants to level the playing field by using sex? Yes, makes sense...but the adult needs to be the one who says a firm "NO" while in a position of power over the young bundle of hormones. I'm not discounting Maksik's assertion that Marie wanted to do it with him; I've been that youthful aggressor myself; I'm saying it was his job to stop the situation because he was the adult and could...or should...see the dreadful consequences of this power imbalance. The young woman maintains she's dealing with a lot of shame and guilt for (I gather) having had an abortion.

A few quotes I quite like, but also point to Maksik not quite hiding the truth of the matter at hand from us:

I would fight for him and against anyone who wouldn't. It wasn't complicated. In the beginning love never is.
–and–
Everything can change, but only with abandon.
–and–
Cowards spend their lives alone. Either with people who can't hurt them, or with no one at all.
–and–
The thing is you have to fight the whole time. You can't stop. Otherwise you just end up somewhere, bobbing in the middle of a life you never wanted.

I find it hard to fault the beautiful simplicity of these aperçus, yet equally hard not to see them as coded mea exculpas for his past behavior.

I don't presume to tell you what you should think of Maksik, or his behavior; I trust you can make up your own mind about him as a person. I think the reality of reading for many, if not most, of us is that we don't or can't separate the writer from the writing (eg, I'll never consume anything at all by Jo Rowling the TERF), so I think you should know whose bank account you're notionally fattening before you buy the book to read it.

Should you, in fact, read it? I say a qualified yes to that, because I like but don't love the writing; and because I don't respond to cishet desire with any kind of enthusiasm. But it's a first novel, so one forgives the occasional longueur without much effort. Since many of y'all are yourselves heterosexual, that won't be a problem (so I assume). There's nothing explicit in the text except reciprocal sexual desire.

Over to you, then; but don't ignore it just because the author's not a nice guy. ( )

You Deserve Nothing alternates narration between three characters - Will, a teacher at an international school in Paris; Gilad, a new student at the school; and Marie, a returning student. Will is a popular teacher, Gilad is an outsider, and Marie is the beautiful sidekick of a more glamorous girl. As Will challenges his students to think critically about literature and philosophy and the world and their lives, he represents - to many of them - a kind of ideal. That he is harboring a secret is no surprise to the reader, but the way the whole thing plays out makes for a propulsive read.

I really enjoyed this novel - the scenes of Will teaching are really well done, as is the high emotion, angsty, edged-in-darkness feel of the teenagers in the book. It rang very true to me. My only real quibble is that Marie was much less present in the narrative. Her sections were shorter than the other two and there were fewer of them. Maksik might have done this on purpose for a reason unknown to me, but it just felt like maybe he wasn't comfortable writing her perspective, in which case, I feel like he should have left it out. Overall, though, a great read. ( )

Interesting narrations, gives different perspectives. Really well written and shocking. ( )

Three hundred and twenty pages, and the train wreck becomes obvious from page forty one. Not a suspense in terms of the ultimate outcome, but it is absorbing and entertaining throughout. ( )