You are either going to really like Catherine House or be like me and wonder, WTF did I just read?? Catherine House is a strange, fever dream of a novel with no clear-cut resolution. I am not even sure that I fully understand what was going on in the novel and what the purpose of the novel is.

In the novel, Catherine House is a college located deep in the Pennsylvania woods with an unusual liberal arts curriculum that somehow has produced some of the world’s best minds as its graduates, such as inventors, prize-winning scientists, Supreme Court justices and at least two presidents. The college is best known for its mysterious “new materials concentration” and the study of “plasm”. The students that attend Catherine House get free tuition and room and board, but the catch is that they must give Catherine House three years of their lives completely removed from the outside world. During these three years, they cannot contact their family and friends, they cannot watch television to keep up with the news and they cannot bring any personal possessions, including clothing, with them (the novel is set in the 1990s, but if it were set in the present, they definitely would not be allowed smart phones either).

Catherine House is told from the perspective of Ines, who is just starting her first year at the college. She is running from some trouble she got into, and Catherine House becomes a refuge for her, even as, over the course of her three years at the college, she begins to realize that there might be something dangerous going on with the new materials concentration.

What I liked about Catherine House is the setting, which is gothic in tone. Catherine House was originally a Victorian mansion, with additional buildings constructed to accommodate all the students and staff on campus. It is grandiose but also in a state of deshabille, with its shabby Victorian furniture, peeling wallpaper, leaks and floods, and heating that often does not work. Ines spends hours just wandering around Catherine House, discovering new rooms and attics full of old junk from when the college used to have a drama program. It is too bad that the plot is not as interesting as the setting.

The plot moves as languidly as Ines moves through the halls of Catherine House. The novel covers only the three years that Ines attends Catherine House, but not a lot happens in those three years. The students attend (or in Ines case, not attend) classes, and they eat (not very appealing or nutritious food), drink (they have access to an unlimited supply of alcohol) and have lots of sex with each other (and even with their teachers). But underneath all that revelry the students are encouraged to partake in, Catherine House seems like a very depressing environment to be in.

Nothing interesting happens at Catherine House until Ines is in her third year and she finally works herself up to finding out what is behind the locked door of the new materials lab, but unfortunately, as disturbing as it is, it is not a surprise what Ines finally discovers.

I found most of the characters in the novel to not be likeable, and Ines is a main character that I do not particularly care about. When she first enters Catherine House, it is apparent that she is lost and suffering from depression.  She spends a lot of time sleeping, she consumes a lot of alcohol and has one-night stands that she can barely remember the next day, she makes little effort to go to classes or do her homework. She wonders how she got into Catherine House and even admits that she is not smart, and I completely agree. Ines comes across as obtuse or maybe just so selfishly wrapped up in her own problems that she does not even realize that she is not the only student on the run from their problems. She knows there is something not right about Catherine House, she even has discussions about it with other students, but somehow it never occurs to her that if she is willing to give up contact with the outside world for three years to hide at Catherine House, then every other student must feel the same way, and nor does it occur to her the implication of why Catherine House would only accept students trying to escape from the outside world. And there is one major clue about the mystery behind the new materials concentration right in front of her face for most of the time she is at Catherine House, and it takes ages for her to pick up on. The most infuriating thing about Ines, though, is that she knows she should not stay at Catherine House, but she is reluctant to leave, like most of the other Kool-Aid guzzling students at the college. The only character I really like is Ines’s friend Yaya because she is the only one that is not completely enamoured with Catherine House and can sense how messed up the place is. The only reason why she is there is to graduate and get the power that the college promises all the students will receive once they leave.

And this is perhaps my biggest problem with Catherine House, there is no explanation for why Catherine House is a powerful college and how the graduates of Catherine House become powerful people, or maybe there is an explanation and I just do not get it? And I still cannot completely wrap my head around the bizarre new materials concentration and plasm. I do not think Catherine House explains itself very well. How annoying if that was the author’s intention.