Memoir

HALF A CENTURY ON, Nat Bickford revisits the predatory advances of two boarding school masters, one at Phillips Exeter, the other at Williston Academy, whose provocative behavior—sadistic in one case, tragic in the other—violated the genteel codes of prep school life in the late 1950s. Less cynical than Catcher in the Rye and more disturbing than A Separate Peace, the narrative benefits from the distance.