Raw memoir of isolation and maternal complexity

WHEN the novelist Stefan Merrill Block moved from Indianapolis to Plano, Texas, at age 8, he struggled to fit in.

- BECCA ROTHFELD

"I try to call it 'home'" he recalls in his absorbing new memoir, Homeschooled, but "the word feels pasted on with a glue stick."

Soon, however, Plano - and specifically the shiny new McMansion where Block lived with his father, his brother and his volatile mother - would morph into a home so all-encompassing that he struggled to escape its confines.

For five years, from fourth through eighth grade, Block was a victim of a 1987 Texas court ruling that legalised home schooling. Isolated from his peers and virtually abandoned by the adults who might have intervened, he moldered behind closed doors with only his unraveling mother for company.

Though Block wondered why his education received so little oversight even as he was enduring it, his memoir is less an indictment of home schooling in general than a vivid portrait of the way the practice failed one child in particular.

Block makes brief note of the regulatory vacuum that allowed his predicament, but for the most part he writes with the phenomenological precision and narrative verve of a novelist.

Before his mother sequestered him (his brother continued attending public school), he was a normal, if nerdy, fourth-grader who spent his days enmeshed in the low-stakes Machiavellian intrigues of elementary school.

He discussed books with his crush, the horse enthusiast Tiffany; goofed off with his best friend, Noah; and drew charts mapping the popularity of each of the kids in his circle. Then, abruptly, he found himself at home, without any jocks to envy or crushes to pine for.

The solitude was agonising, as was the boredom. What he missed most, Block recalls, was "the mysterious complexity that is Other Kids".