There will be those of you who start The Rehearsal, only to throw it across the room after 10 pages. Such is the florid imagery and all-pervading precocity of Eleanor Catton’s debut novel. Stick with it. She may be only 23 years old now (and 20 when she began writing the novel), but this young New Zealander knows her business. While The Rehearsal — a novel about the aftermath of a high-school sex scandal — is imperfect, it represents a starburst of talent and the arrival of an author wholly different from anyone else writing today.

Unsurprisingly, Catton’s exuberant, postmodern debut has not won everyone to her cause. In New Zealand, where the book was published last year, some reviewers accused it of being “too much head, too little heart”. But around the world it has gained admirers and awards. Indeed, Joshua Ferris, the author of Then We Came to the End, was effulgent in his praise: “You get the style, the sophistication, the boundless possibility and the narrative pleasures that make up any good novel, but you get a bonus, too: a glimpse into the future of the novel itself.”

All this attention is made more remarkable when you consider that Catton, a giggly, tomboyish chatterbox from Christchurch, on the South Island, is still finishing a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, one of the most presti­gious programmes of its kind. Indeed, she began the course only after The Rehearsal was published. Many Iowa graduates have gone on to win Pulitzers, but few have garnered international recognition before school is out. Charmingly, Catton is still anxious enough that she often scours the internet for new reviews of her book.

“I remember reading one in New Zealand, and they really didn’t like the book,” she says. “The reviewer said, ‘If people talked like this in real life, I’d shoot myself.’ That made me laugh, because if people talked like they do in The Rehearsal in real life, I think I’d shoot myself, too.”

The reviewer’s hackles were raised, in particular, by the dialogue of a character who teaches saxophone and acts as an indiscreet confessor to legions of troubled young girls. This teacher is prone to gorgeous, implausible similes — she talks, for instance, of an embarrassed student’s posture

“folding up tight like the lips of a blossom”. But Catton’s purple dialogue has a point. The novel, as its title suggests, is interested in performance, and about how those affected by the sex scandal perform their own personalities.

Catton understands their plight. She attended a co-ed high school in her home town and admits she was “very self-conscious and dissatisfied at school... those years were sort of hellish”. She was “into music and drama and sculling, a lot of different things, because I couldn’t quite work out what I wanted to be”.

Was there a sex scandal at her school?

“No, but we wanted there to be,” she says, breaking into peals of laughter. “We thought, if only something would happen! We had all that overflow of feeling inside us, and that kind of hyperawareness of where everyone was sitting, and what that means, and the unpicking of every utterance. I think that’s what girls do at high school.”

Catton came to New Zealand from Canada at the age of six, with her two older siblings and her parents, a philosophy professor and a librarian. As a child, she wrote short stories and “the beginnings of novels”.

After studying English at Canterbury University, she moved to Victoria University, in Wellington, to study creative writing. The Rehearsal was the manuscript she produced for her MA at Victoria. How did the idea emerge?

“I had written a dramatic monologue about a saxophone teacher involved in a sex scandal,” she says. “It was about three or four pages long, and about a month later I was looking over some old files on my computer and I wondered whether I could turn it into a piece of fiction. It just sort of grew from there.”

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