By Reviewer: PETER PIERCE
NO BOOK BUT THE WORLD
By Leah Hager Cohen. The Clerkenwell Press, $27.95.
The title of American author Leah Hager Cohen's latest novel is explained by the epigraph: ''Let there be no book but the world''. It comes from the treatise on education, Emile, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This is one of the many maxims by the French philosopher that inspires Neel Robbins, who has founded an experimental school in the woods at Batter Hollow.
Another example that he follows is A.S. Neill's school, Summerhill. Robbins' pupils and the two children of his late third marriage, Ava and Fred, are inducted into Rousseau's principles, tendered pompously in solemn earnest: ''the blessings of liberty are worth many wounds'', among them.
Yet Fred is on the autism spectrum, a diagnosis that Robbins would reject as ''the medicalisation of personhood'' and Ava wonders in sorrowful resentment, ''Why did you insist on making us unfit?''
An unsympathetic observer of the experiment judged in his documentary that Robbins was ''more primatologist than educator''.
Despite cautions to herself that ''I have been too fond of stories'', that they entrance with an ''easy danger'', Ava narrates No Book but the World.
The occasion for the retrospect on her parents, on her own childhood and that of her brother, of her marriage to Dennis Monseau, an ''eco-friendly insulator'' who had also been a pupil at Batter Hollow, is the arrest of Fred on the charge of murdering a young boy.
To see what can be done for him and to assess what made Fred what he seems to be, Ava travels to the aptly named town of Perdu, towards the Canadian border, near the penitentiary where her brother is being held.
The long first section of the novel ends with her admission that ''Fred had spent so much of the last decade in reaches unknown to me'', and with her attendance at the memorial service for the dead child, James Ferebee.
There is now a sour irony in one of her father's favourite borrowed maxims: ''That learning is born of experience, that suffering is a valuable teacher''.
The next three parts of the novel are told as if from the point of view of other participants in the events it relates.
Thus, the ground of the stories that we have already heard is retraced and reinspected.
The first of these narrators is Dennis Monseau, who reflects with a sympathy that is aware of how little it avails that ''year by year Freddy was losing ground, becoming increasingly odd and unappealing - unincludable - in the eyes of the world''.
The next voice is that of his sister, Kitty, Ava's childhood best friend and sister-in-law, who believes that not only Robbins' attempts to make Fred a Rousseauean ''natural man'' have damaged him, but she and Ava were guilty of ''a kind of gentle persecution, [in] what they did to Fred, what he permitted them to do''.
Finally, we are admitted to Freddy's responses, not only to his imprisonment, but to the innocent involvement with criminals that helped bring him to this and to the memories of misinterpreted, traumatic events long ago.
In the short final section of the book, ''The Thing Itself'', Ava resumes and explains her storytelling, the latter in a way some readers will not find persuasive.
She is back in Perdu. There are potentially good developments that may lead to the collapse of the case against her brother. Her compulsive need to analyse him leads to this conclusion: ''Fred's destructive urges stemmed from a more basic need: simply to know his own agency.''
Cohen's No Book but the World is imbued with an unflagging intelligence, but also with a will to empathy that does not always convince. There is a paradoxical cold comfort in its belief in how much should be forgiven, but of how hard this is and of how scantily the inward lives of others can be understood.