When I was in high school, I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. It was making a stir on the literary scene at the time, and I remember thinking it was a serious, grown-up novel for serious, grown-up people. While my friends were chewing through Twilight and Harry Potter for the eighteenth time, I momentarily put those books down to consume this novel frantically, staying up too late multiple nights in a row to reach the end. Looking back, I don’t know where or how I found the novel. A film version staring Andrew Garfield had just come out—so perhaps I found it at a bookstore, drawn in by Garfield’s soulful eyes and floppy hair. I also don’t remember why I was so hurried to finish the book. As I now see, the novel is not a page-turner; it explains the outcomes for the characters in the first 20 pages, but it is deeply tragic, and I couldn’t believe it really was going to end so sadly. I didn’t understand the novel, not even close, but I loved it, and it helped me solidify a growing feeling that I wanted to study English more seriously.
Fast-forward quite a bit, through a B.A. in English that turned into a Ph.D. that did not turn into an academic job. I found myself teaching at a boarding school out West, very far from home and very far from where my younger self thought I would be as an adult. A Ph.D. in English has a way of making you fall out of love with reading. Despite my best intentions, when reading books became a job and when graduate seminars felt like entering a gladiator arena, it was hard to find pleasure in the activity anymore. Many people have told me over the years that graduate school messed up their relationship with books. The skills I was taught—to skim, dissect, and digest big ideas—made reading a few pages of something before bed or spending a lazy Sunday with a novel feel like trying to recall the plot of a movie I’d seen on TV as a kid. Just reading was the quaint activity of a simpler time before I knew who Lacan and Derrida were. I stopped reading things that didn’t connect directly to my dissertation, with occasional exceptions that mostly consisted of grisly crime novels you could buy at the airport. Friends and family, knowing that I studied books for a living, asked for book recommendations. I quipped that if they wanted to read something that came out after 1818, I could not help them.
My feeling that I couldn’t read felt even more true in the summer of 2020. I was on track to complete my dissertation and was actively looking for jobs in secondary education when the pandemic hit. I secured an offer the week before most places locked down at an all-boys boarding school in a town I had never heard of on the opposite side of the country. I graduated from my Ph.D. program and packed a U-Haul into a crisis. I felt adrift, my defense moved to Zoom and my graduation canceled. I didn’t even mind that much, because I was struggling to wrap my hands around my new job, also moved to Zoom for the foreseeable future. When I asked what the school wanted me to teach, the principal said, “well, what do you want to teach?” This simple question set off the makings of an existential crisis: What did I want to teach? (I had thought I wanted to be a professor, but a dismal job market convinced me otherwise.) What did I like? (I didn’t know anymore.) What would my students like? (This seemed even harder to answer.) Would they even like me?
I was plagued with doubts as I surveyed the canon. I tried to reach back to something vaguely contemporary that I hadn’t totally hated…Never Let Me Go? I typed the title into Google and was relieved to see that it had become a popular choice in high school classes in the many years since I had myself been a high schooler. I wouldn’t look insane or out of touch if I proposed it, so I briskly ordered a class set and told myself it was a good choice.
Never Let Me Go is narrated by the protagonist, Kathy H., who is a graduate of the prestigious boarding school Hailsham. Kathy is a “carer” for “donors,” and narrates the tale as if we, the readers, are part of her world. The novel is set in England in the 1990s. We slowly realize that the characters are clones created to donate their organs, and that Never Let Me Go is a science fiction novel. The novel is about Kathy and her friends as they grow up, sort of, and reckon with their fate to die prematurely from repeated organ donations in their thirties. The book is achingly sad, made more so by the nostalgia it conveys for times gone past. Kathy cherishes a cassette tape with the fictional song “Never Let Me Go,” a refrain that becomes all the more painful as she must let her friends go one by one. Kathy’s friends Tommy and Ruth succumb to their donation schedules, but not before Kathy and Tommy realize they are in love and try and get a “deferral” of their donations for a few years. They are bitterly unsuccessful. Their dreams of growing up and having something of a life together come to naught. Kathy narrates all of this to the readers as if they are also clones in a donation center. Kathy often talks about how her main job as a carer is to listen and reminisce with the patients—and then we listen as she reminisces with us. This narrative structure is Ishiguro’s way of probing the limits of empathy and asking questions about how willing society is to stomach suffering for the “greater good.” It is an excellent novel.
Reading it again in 2020, this time on the leafy campus of a boarding school, it was easy to become immersed in the world of Hailsham. I was, essentially, cosplaying the setting, as the architecture, uniforms, and nomenclature of my school borrowed much from the English boarding school example. My students, likewise, helped me see the novel through new eyes. Much of the plot of the novel happens when the characters are children and then young adolescents. Their lives end at around thirty-three–an age that I am myself rapidly approaching. I realized that part of what makes this novel so effective is that it embodies the teenage years so well that teenage readers see themselves, and adults are forced to reminisce about their younger selves. The novel’s nostalgia for the past invites readers to bask in nostalgia, and thereby practice a kind of radical empathy with their younger selves. The involuntary memory of Proust’s madeleine is weaponized by the setting for the gut punch of the novel’s emotional arc. Because Never Let Me Go is bildungsroman that never gets to benefit from true experience.
For my students, the romantic relationships they started in their teen years, the decisions they made about college or future career plans, the fights they had with friends—the stakes felt life-or-death. Teenage emotions can be hard to adjust to as an adult, but the depth of their feeling is honestly something I love about adolescents. Like the characters in Never Let Me Go, they can’t see much beyond their current lives; they cannot picture themselves yet at 30 or 40 or 50. Therefore, their reactions to scenes and characters in Never Let Me Go can vary a lot from my own, and in interpreting the novel with them, I catch glimpses of my younger self and my first reading of the novel. They often feel shock, whereas I feel grim recognition. Their shock is not just surprise at the plot, it’s also shock at the minor tragedies of adulthood: growing apart from friends, leaving familiar settings, dating the wrong person, seeing with hindsight where exactly you went wrong. They are shocked because they often cannot imagine doing the things the characters do, while I know that they will in fact do most of those things. This is the grief I couldn’t understand as a young person: the aching loss adults feel toward their younger selves. It is nostalgia for childhood, but also the catharsis of being able to see your own fatal flaws. This isn’t to say adulthood is all regret, but it is hard-won experience. And, teaching teenagers is like being Cassandra, doomed to predict their mistakes and not be believed, because those mistakes can only be understood in the making.
For the first time in years, I cried when I got to the end of a novel. I have since taught Never Let Me Go several times, and I’ve cried every time. I think some of my students might cry too, but they never tell me that. My aesthetic reaction caught me by surprise the first time, since I had assumed that a) I could not read anymore, and b) that I had autopsied books to the point that they could hold no secrets for me. They could not have that kind of power over me anymore. But watching my students experience reading a serious, grown-up novel for the first time helped me heal my relationship with reading after graduate school. The students helped me enjoy the experience of reading a novel again because they let me see the novel as I had first seen it. I began to remember why I had wanted to pursue a Ph.D. in English in the first place, and why novels are something I’ll never let go of.
Katherine Nolan holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago and works on objectification and consent in eighteenth-century novels. She teaches high school English in the Pacific Northwest.