Blue Cubicle Press, the small independent publisher that put out Emil DeAndreis’s debut collection Beyond Folly, specializes in workplace fiction. As their website explains, “We’re here to support the artists trapped in the daily grind.” The dichotomy of work versus art is omnipresent in DeAndreis’s stories, which follow Horton Hagardy, a mid-20s failing poet thrust into the world of substitute teaching to support his fading passion. Always underprepared and usually overmatched, Hagardy serves as a window into the world of San Francisco’s morphing and much-maligned K-12 public schools. Texting students, faulty lesson plans, and inept administrators all contribute to the madness of the education system in these stories. And Hagardy is just as guilty. He is at some moments a dunce and at others just like many one of us—overeducated, underappreciated, and struggling to reach a place beyond his current lot.
Authors regularly valorize or demonize the teacher—the teacher is used as a foil to better understand some other protagonist. But Beyond Folly, which progresses chronologically through a school year, from the annual Substitute Orientation to eight vastly different classrooms, is about the interior life of the teacher, not the student. Every school and every assignment, from librarian to AP English teacher to Computer Lab specialist, works predominantly as a way for the reader to better understand what makes Hagardy tick. A conversation with an Advanced Placement English Class highlights his consuming nostalgia: “It used to be that ideas were not pulled from thin air and sculpted flimsily into ‘art’.” His stint in the computer lab demonstrates the separation he feels from the other subs: “They are overeager to reveal their harsh daily bouts with things like rheumatoid arthritis, claustrophobia, or explosive bunions, which prevent them from getting jobs in the real world.” Hagardy is a young man who happens to be a substitute teacher, not a teacher who happens to be a man. In each story, we understand a little more about how hard it is to make it as a poet and how easy it is for a job to turn into a career. No one ever plans on becoming a middle-aged substitute, and yet there are countless people who find themselves in that lot.
In the rare instances when the teacher has been given the leading role in a novel—in Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace to name two—the majority of the narrative arc occurs outside the classroom. Pirsig’s Phaedrus rediscovers himself on the road and Coetzee’s David Lurie is finally undone on his daughter’s farm. For Hagardy, his demise takes the form of a myriad of small failures within the classroom—a spilled burrito, an argument with a class clown, and finally an unfortunate YouTube clip.
Beyond Folly, understood as a collection, is about a young man trying to negotiate growing up and failing to become the person he believed he’d be. When we meet Hagardy, he is at his fourth Annual Substitute Orientation; he is twenty-seven, disinterested in the job and struggling with his writing. This could have been a tragic story, but DeAndreis’s comedic tone keeps the prose from sinking into morose melodrama. The Hagardy of the early stories remains resolute and prideful in the face of chaos and chicanery. When an absent teacher leaves him the lesson plan— “facilitate a dense literary discussion”—Hagardy greets the AP English Class with tongue in cheek: ‘“I have been instructed to facilitate a literary discussion with you, densely.”’ But as the collection progresses, he begins to slip deeper into that familiar darkness of the artist as a slightly less young man. Stripped of his artistic façade, he’s forced to examine the reality that he’s becoming what he used to deride: a career sub. In an especially striking moment in the penultimate story, “Day Off,” the narrator explains that Hagardy does not write much poetry anymore: “When he sat down with a pen and pad, he had a difficult time starting—he couldn’t seem to get past the fact that no matter what he wrote and rewrote, no matter how polished and poignant he thought his work was, there was a good chance it would go unpublished.” Hagardy’s tale is a familiar one, but the specificity of his professional life makes the stories of Beyond Folly resonate.
Beyond Folly ends with “Banana Pancakes,” a story of farce and tragedy that hits the nail a little too squarely on the head in its commentary on the absurdity of our digital age. But it’s the quiet moments in the book that elevate it as a collection of fiction. The substitute is an inherently comic character, but DeAndreis crafts a three-dimensional protagonist and treats him with a level of respect that welcomes both judgment and empathy. Hagardy is not without his pocks, but beneath his faults, he remains very recognizably human. We watch as time slips by for Hagardy, and he’s taunted by a childhood that is concurrently dangled before him and too distant to ever recapture. We cringe as he continually harps on a better past—some other time when kids were kids and the world was fair. But we don’t trust that either he or the unnamed narrator really believes that that time ever existed. It’s just easier than admitting that it’s always been just like this.
