All the Castles Burned by Michael Nye

Abstract

Reviewed by: All the Castles Burned by Michael Nye Bayard Godsave (bio) Michael Nye. All the Castles Burned. Turner Publishing Company, 2018. Michael Nye's debut novel opens with a description of Rockcastle Preparatory Academy, an elite Cincinnati boys' school. From afar, the school appears elegant, bucolic, "shining triumphantly in the morning light," but inside the old buildings are run-down and drafty. That play of appearance, of what is presented to the world outside and what is hidden, or ignored, is a theme that will carry through the whole of the book. The novel's central character and narrator, Owen Webb, is a working-class kid who has found himself at Rockcastle, thanks in part to his talent on the basketball court, where he meets an older boy, Carson Bly. Carson, unlike Owen, belongs at Rockcastle. He comes from money, groomed for the Ivy League, but even from his first appearance it is clear that there is something beneath the surface: a brooding anger, a darkness. Owen and Carson's friendship develops on the basketball court. Older, worldly, Carson takes the younger boy (Owen is a freshman at this point) under his wing. He helps him navigate the politics of the school, introduces him to alcohol. The two have a standing engagement to play one-on-one during free period in a run-down, nearly forgotten gym in an older part of the school. Under Carson's tutelage Owen begins to blossom, but it is at this point that Carson's dark side is revealed. Another boy, Owen discovers, who was once Carson's protégé, suffered a mysterious break-down. Despite this, or because of it, Owen is drawn to Carson Bly. But Owen has his secrets too, some even that, as the novel opens, he does not yet know he has. Owen lives far from the school, in a little ranch house that stands in stark contrast to the spacious mansions of his classmates. He relies on his mom for a ride, while so many of the other Rockcastle boys drive their own cars—of course, his dependence on his mother is due in part to his age, but he cannot help seeing this as another marker of difference between him and everyone else. At home, Owen has to deal with an overbearing father, a mother who loves him but who is exhausted and often distant. Midway through the book, it is revealed, rather publicly, that Owen's father is hiding a criminal secret. Ironically, it's this revelation, though it tears apart his home, that seems to make him finally feel he belongs at Rockcastle. On the day after the news has broken about his father, Owen dreads going to school, anticipating cruel words, stony looks, but instead he is treated as though nothing happened. In the year or so he'd been there, he'd learned, in part because of Carson, of the sordid family histories of all these well-to-do boys, everyone knew everyone else's secrets, but no one ever said a word, not in the open anyway. Now it's Owen's turn: they all surely know what his father has done, but they act as if they don't. He's become one of them. Michael Nye is an insightful writer and his novel gets a lot of things right. His depictions of Cincinnati, where he grew up, through the eyes of Owen, are spot-on, capturing the way that many who live in the Rust Belt can have an intimate attachment to infinitely replicable spaces like freeway interchanges and supermarkets. The moments when Owen and his mother share the page are striking for their subtlety and grace. Much of the book is about power, either writ-large in the class relationships it explores, or on a more intimate level where it probes the power dynamics between characters. And [End Page 224] the book always approaches its relationships knowing just that: that power is a dynamic, not a one-way thing. Whether it's with his mother, his father, or Carson—or the principal of the boys' school, or any number of other characters he encounters—Owen is always the...