Sex, Death and Education

In Elizabeth Hay’s 2007 novel Late Nights on Air, the book a character selects to cure her insomnia falls open at a passage beginning “Like imperfect sleep.” It is a “lovely coincidence,” the character muses, “but it doesn’t lead anywhere.”

As Hay’s work demonstrates better than almost anyone else’s, coincidences, recurrences, re-encounters and reverberations from the past can lead novelists to fruitful places in their explorations of human interaction. However, her most recent book, Alone in the Classroom, expects perhaps too much of coincidence as a guide in crafting a contemporary story pegged to the endless repercussions of two long-ago incidents occurring almost a decade apart in two widely separated localities— yet featuring the same quartet of major characters brought back together by chance.

All four meet in 1929, when 18-year-old Connie Flood makes her teaching debut in the fictional Saskatchewan hamlet of Jewel. Ian “Parley�...