All Loves Excelling, by Josiah Bunting.
New York: Bridge Works Publishing, 2001.
$22.95 - 320 pages.

All Loves Excelling is the story of Amanda Bahringer, a student at a prestigious boarding school who is struggling to gain admission to Dartmouth College. This novel is also Josiah Bunting’s latest critique of our educational system.

Three years ago, Bunting wrote An Education For Our Time, an outstanding novel about a billionaire who spent the last years of his life planning a new college. From college instructor qualifications to living arrangements in dorms, from physical fitness requirements to character development, Bunting’s character, John Adams, described what he wished to see taught in his new college.

In All Loves Excelling, Bunting turns to the rugged, harsh, and often cruel world of the college prepratory school. Pushed by her mother and by various administrators and teachers, Amanda Bahringer joins the race for admission to the college of her choice: Dartmouth. She sends the college a video of herself playing the piano, runs cross-country in part to help her admission, and undergoes classes for the SAT.

As the pressure builds, Amanda begins taking more and more prescription drugs: Serax, Xamax, Halcion, and a dozen other drugs designed to make her calmer, make her brighter, make her sleep, make her wake. Soon she begins to diet obsessively, celebrating the loss of every pound from her already thin frame, stuffing herself at times with cookies that she then regurgitates into the sink in her room.
Badgered by her mother about her grades, estranged from most of her classmates because of their schedules and fierce competition for grades, Amanda slowly withdraws into a deep, interior cave of loneliness and despair.

Only Dr. Passmore, the school’s headmaster, connects with Amanda. He teaches a poetry course, and in his class Amanda, assisted by Dr. Passmore’s insights and patience, comes to know and love the poetry of A.E. Housman and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Unlike Amanda’s other teachers and friends, Passmore sees through the testing, the constant barrage of information about the SAT, the quality point averages, and the reference letters. Passmore knows that the true meaning of education is not getting into the right college, but is instead the beginning of wisdom, the art of learning how to live as a full human being. Yet Passmore, who rarely challenges the system, lacks the final insight and strength needed to help Amanda.

As Bunting takes us through Amanda’s year, we begin to realize how fine the line is between challenging students and crushing them. We also come to understand how confused human beings can become in terms of their goals. Amanda’s mother, Tess, and then Amanda herself make entrance into Dartmouth College the sole aim of her existence. They are like tidy people who make tidiness their goal rather than their means to a goal, and so become obsessive.

Amanda’s father, Joey, represents one of the voices of reason in the book. He looks out for Amanda’s happiness rather than for his idea of Amanda’s happiness. Joey tells Tess that

“... She gets into Dartmouth, she gets in. She doesn’t, it’s not the end of the world. She can go to three other colleges ... The people that run the world never heard of Dartmouth. Guy that runs Marshall Oil, he never went to college. Bill Gates dropped out. The faculties of these places are all big-time liberal.”

Yet, like Dr. Passmore, Joey is not strong enough himself to overcome the forces pushing and pulling at Amanda.

Bunting’s qualifications for writing All Loves Excelling are stellar. A Rhodes scholar and an Oxford graduate, a veteran of Vietnam, Bunting has in the last three decades served as president of Briarcliff College, a New York women’s college; president of Hampton-Sydney College in Virginia; headmaster of the prestigious Lawrenceville School; and superintendent of Virginia Military Institute (He successfully managed the transition from an all-male corps of cadets to a co-ed student body). His long march through the academic world - the conversations with parents, the apprehensions and occasional triumphs of the young, the meaning of a real education - gives such a sense of harsh authenticity to his story that Amanda may seem real to us when we finish the book.

Bunting’s intense love for education and his affection for the young both shine through in this haunting tale.

(Jeff Minick owns Saints and Scholars Bookstore in downtown Waynesville.)

 

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