[A Good School is a novel] which invites you to read it as autobiography….

[It] either succeeds or fails according to our sense of how well [Yates] has understood his own experience, of how clearly he is able to bring that experience into focus through the lens of his implicit assumptions about it.

The action of the novel concerns events during the last three years in the existence of a boys' boarding school in Connecticut just before and during World War II. There are several narrative threads, many functioning independently and none really dominant, yet one feels that Bill Grove has some claim to being considered the protagonist, not only because of his identification with the author but because he is the only character who seems to develop at all….

The absence of much complexity in the characterization of the boys is not a problem. They sort themselves...