High Expectations

In his new novel, set at a boarding school, Alex Tilney ’96 captures the naïveté and irrationality of the adolescent mind

Ben Loehnen ’96

Alex Tilney ’96

Alexander Tilney ’96 spent the better part of a decade writing The Expectations, a novel published by Little, Brown earlier this year. While a disclaimer at the front of the book says that “any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author,” the great character of this book is St. Paul’s School, where Tilney was my friend and formmate. In the novel, St. James has taken the place of St. Paul.

For alumni of St. Paul’s, the book will evoke powerful sensory memories. We run over “playing fields like green lakes” and “the springy give in the red shredded-rubber surface” of the track. The reader hears the Westminster Quarters ringing from the Chapel. Students blast through “the crossbars” of exit doors. The tails of blazers stick below the bottoms of Gore-Tex jackets as boys walk to Seated Meal. Dorm names have changed, and a “black worker ant” has replaced the pelican in the school’s iconography, but it’s a magical experience to read Tilney’s novel with the landscape of Millville pre-imprinted.

Beyond the trippiness of these memories, the power of The Expectations extends beyond Tilney’s poetic and linguistic gifts, which are extraordinary. This novel captures the naïveté and irrationality of the adolescent mind. The novel’s action centers around a group of students trying to meet their own expectations of themselves, that they are more assured and confident – more adult, in a sense – than any teenager might possibly be. In contrast, the book’s title comes from the St. James Companion, a code of conduct written by the school’s third Rector, William Beech, that lists the school’s ethical and moral “expectations” of its students. Not surprisingly, students’ expectations and the school’s expectations don’t always align.

The novel’s drama revolves around a boy named Ben Weeks during his first year at St. James (or “SJS”). Ben is the youngest son of a family that has attended St. James from its founding in 1856. His great-great-grandfather, Thomas Weeks, was one of the first seven students at SJS. Ben arrives in the middle 1990s with a sense of expectation of himself, and of the school. “This place was for him,” the book portends, and he arrives on campus buoyed by his gifts as a squash player and by a familiarity with the place’s mores and traditions.

Ben’s roommate, Ahmed Al-Khaled, lacks his “sense of proportion.” Ahmed doesn’t know of the “intentionality in Triscuits and Cabot Cheddar” or the social signifiers of a North Face jacket or a Marlboro Racing ball cap. The scion of a wealthy Dubai family, he arrives at school with two servants to build out the furniture in their dorm room. His clothing (Brioni suits and John Lobb shoes) and lack of guile, as well as his refusal to participate in some of the noxious “traditions” of dorm life, make him a pariah.

The book is written in the third-person, but the character of Ben refracts most of the novel’s ethical energy. There’s a sense in the book that St. James is not what it once was, and it’s the students themselves (and not the faculty or the parents) who seem singularly perturbed that its “design... was starting to break down.” Tilney mines and critiques this sense of self-appointed guardianship. When the school’s administration rightfully dismisses an odious bully, one student remarks, “Ennis was everything right and badass about this school.” Another student grumbles, “St. James is in decline. The administration is trying to, like, mass-market the school.”

Tilney brilliantly uses this laughable cockiness to get at the real turmoil and confusion adolescents face. In a small but sharp moment in the book, Ben enters his dorm at check-in, where a Chinese teacher, Mr. Tan, is on duty: “He strangely envied Mr. Tan; how nice and simple it must be to be an older dignified Chinese man, how clear the ways you’re supposed to act.” In a single sentence, Tilney shows how self-centered and oblivious the adolescent mind can be.

But the tenderest and most moving parts of the book come as Ben and some of the other students succeed in meeting the school’s “expectations,” and most of these times come in clandestine moments as Ben and Ahmed (the former at first judgmental and wary of the latter) care for each other, ultimately solving each other’s problems, some mundane and some monumental. After one bruising incident, Ben has “for the first time...the feeling adults have whenever trying to relate to children.” At one point, Ben consoles Ahmed, “In a year, you won’t remember any of this.” Ahmed laughs, and replies, “I will remember.”

Ahmed, of course, is right. While I couldn’t distill what, if any, of Tilney’s own experience of St. Paul’s informed the plot lines of this novel, the book he’s written is a beautiful study of memory and a gift to us all.