Every good campus novel must feature at least one awkward party scene. After all, what is a campus without parties, and how can a group of students, professors, or some combination thereof mingle but awkwardly? Emily Adrian’s Seduction Theory (Little, Brown and Company, $28, 224 pp.) gets to this generic requirement in its first paragraph:
At the creative writing department’s end-of-year party, Ethan’s secretary fed him kale with her fingers. Ethan wasn’t supposed to call Abigail his secretary. Trouble was, Abigail often referred to herself as his secretary in wry subversion of the school’s progressive values, and her jokes had eclipsed her actual job title in Ethan’s memory. The party was crowded. Grad students were crammed into the kitchen, hoping their advisors heard them talking about sex. In the adjacent living room, academic spouses grew weary of discussing summer plans, as if everyone had summers off. Soon the house would overheat. Guests would spill into the yard but for now stayed close to the collapsible buffet table on which they’d placed their offerings. “I brought the kale salad,” said Abigail, who was not attractive but to whom Ethan was attracted. He’d formed a habit of fixating on her least appealing features, her crusty eyelashes and fleshy earlobes, daring his lust to subside, which it did not.
Part of what makes this so excellent an opening is how effortlessly Adrian moves between the particular and the generic, the singular detail (kale rather than romaine salad, fed with fingers rather than a fork) and the habitual, expected action (“the house would overheat. Guests would spill into the yard”). We read genre fiction—and the campus novel, just as much as the detective novel, is genre fiction—precisely to experience both familiarity and surprise. We get the thrill of recognition. Of course university mores would demand not so much a dignified job as a dignified job title that no one, least of all the person it supposedly dignifies, can be bothered to use or even remember. Of course grad students would start acting like naughty teenagers when alcohol and advisors come together. But we also thrill to the unexpected: Ethan’s focus on “fleshy earlobes,” the mean bluntness of “who was not attractive but to whom Ethan was attracted.” This is how genre seduces us, luring with the old and then hooking with the new.
Academic novels often center on asymmetries of power—professor and student, permanent and non-permanent instructors—and Seduction Theory is no exception. Ethan, a creative-writing adjunct, is married to Simone, a more attractive and accomplished creative-writing professor with whom he declares himself to be happy and on whom he cheats with Abigail. Ethan’s one novel, Muse, fictionalized Simone’s grief over her mother’s death and, in the process, won him “a rave New York Times review, an appearance on a national morning show, emails from peripheral friends paranoid that Ethan had become famous, modest sales, and no second book.” His would-be follow-up, “an erotic historical novel about spouse-swapping archaeologists in mid-century Greece,” hasn’t worked out. He’s an OK teacher at the fictional Edwards University and a no-longer-relevant writer: exactly the pathetic figure you might expect. (Has a novel ever featured another kind of male creative-writing professor?)
By contrast, Simone is sexy and successful, an acclaimed memoirist with a “nine-hundred dollar slip dress she wore to the National Book Awards” and “forthcoming scholarship on nonmonogamy in the twenty-first century.” She doesn’t yet know that Ethan and Abigail have slept together, but she does sense that her MFA student, a young woman named Robbie, is besotted with her. Soon the two are reading Woolf together, running together, flirting and drinking together, almost but not quite showering together. What Simone gets out of the relationship is unclear. A sense of power? A chance to play at the nonmonogamy she’s writing about? A real affection she’s afraid to act on? Or perhaps she’s just putting into practice her seduction theory of pedagogy: “In [Simone’s] view, desire was built into education. Why else would the pupil obey her instructor?”
Almost exactly midway through the novel, Simone discovers the affair (email cc’s really complicate cheaters’ lives) and her theoretical claims—the classroom is an inherently seductive space and that’s OK!; throuples are the way of the future!—actually get tested. So far, so expected, and Seduction Theory is filled with pitch-perfect, darkly comic details about academic and literary life. My personal favorite? At another terrible party, Professor Charlotte Stevenson, a “four-foot-eleven trauma scholar who made herself receptive to disclosures,” posits that “Hamlet was the original asexual. Two grad students agreed, and one was inscrutably upset. ‘Do you identify as ace?’ Charlotte asked the unraveling one.”
What turns Seduction Theory into something stranger than an excellent if straight academic satire is its structural gambit. Namely, the very first page tells us that the book we’re reading—the book in which we hear about Simone’s cruel flirtations and Ethan’s pathetic preparations for his first sexual encounter with Abigail (he shaves his ears and “the coarse hairs that sprouted sporadically from his shoulders”)—is in fact Robbie’s MFA thesis. Eventually we learn that Robbie plans to submit the document to her committee in the hopes of blowing up Ethan and Simone’s marriage. In other words, what we’re reading is literature-as-revenge.
But the manuscript is also literature-as-seduction. If Robbie is a good enough writer, if she can get Simone to see Ethan for the self-indulgent loser he is and Robbie for the true love she is, then maybe this academic plot can have that rarest of things, a happy ending. “I’m sorry I made you feel none of this was real,” Robbie imagines Simone declaring. “I’m in awe of you as a woman and as a writer. You have bewitched me, Robbie, body and soul.” Robbie loves and resents Simone; she wants to punish and be cherished by her. Literature can be seduction. Like seduction, it also can be a working out of ambivalence.
Not everything in Seduction Theory succeeds. The novel’s middle third, during which Simone and Ethan take a cross-country road trip, doesn’t match the punchiness of the opening or the genuine surprise of the conclusion, and the metafictional tricksiness can sometimes seem too tricksy. Nabokov is everywhere in Seduction Theory, for instance. There’s a dog named Humbert, and that road trip echoes the journey taken across America in Lolita; Ethan considers Pnin his comfort book; and Edwards resembles Cornell, where Nabokov taught for years. But I’m not sure what all this doffing of the cap from one unreliable narrator to another adds up to. Of course, Adrian is smart enough to know that she has given herself a get-out-of-jail-free card. This is a creative-writing thesis, after all. Were you not expecting Robbie to proclaim her influences? You can always count on an MFA student for a self-conscious prose style.
Most of Seduction Theory is written in free indirect style: third-person narration that moves in and out of individual characters’ interiorities. We’re in Ethan’s mind as he sleeps with Abigail. We’re in Simone’s consciousness as she considers how it’s possible for her to understand her marriage as “her most cherished project” even while her academic project challenges monogamy and her partner betrays her. All of which is to say, Robbie pretends to a knowledge of Simone and Ethan that she can never have, knowledge that none of us can ever have of another person—outside of fiction. Fiction, through artifice, can arrive at truth. Artifice isn’t incidental but essential to the task. As Emily Adrian knows and Seduction Theory proves, the trick is to seduce the reader into forgetting this fact.
Another and very different kind of campus novel, Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons (Picador, $23, 768 pp.), has recently been reissued by Picador. You might remember some of the discourse surrounding the book’s publication in 2004, much of which centered on the fact that a very old (and culturally conservative) man was writing about the experiences of a very young girl in her first year at the elite, alcohol-soaked, sex-and-basketball-crazed Dupont University.
The titular Charlotte Simmons comes from the Blue Ridge Mountains, where people talk different, as Wolfe reminds you again and again. (“‘I didn’t tell you last night, you were tired’—tarred,” he helpfully italicizes. And if you didn’t get it the first or fifth time: “‘O, I’ve heard a them!’ They-em.”). Charlotte imagines Dupont University as an intellectual paradise that, after four years, will issue her a ticket to the good life. But her freshman year involves one disillusionment after another: gross frat parties, bad grades, worse sex. By the novel’s end, she has been ground down by the educational system, transformed from one Charlotte Simmons (naïve and passionate, in love with ideas and excited by the prospect of their exploration) into another entirely (popular and jaded, performing enthusiasm at a Dupont basketball game).
In an introduction to the new edition, the critic Merve Emre writes that, while an undergrad, she would head to the college bookstore to secretly read the novel, “sit[ting] on the floor behind a large white column, which was broad enough to hide her from the clerks and the customers below.” The novel wasn’t that controversial. Did many find the book cringey, even creepy? Yes. Did anyone have to resort to espionage to avoid disapproving eyes? I doubt it. Like Emre, I was in college in 2004. I didn’t read I Am Charlotte Simmons then, surreptitiously or otherwise. But I can confirm: the cringing critics were on the right side of history. Not because a male writer shouldn’t imagine a woman’s sexual experience, though there are only so many times one can read about this or that character’s “mons pubis.” (“She could see there were couples everywhere on the floor, dancing mons pubis to mons pubis”; “some of the Saint Rays were thrusting their montes pubis”; “she could feel the bone of her mons pubis pressed against his.” I could but won’t go on.) And it’s not because Wolfe is too old to render youthful experience, though his tendency to use scare quotes and explain “slang” does give one pause. (From a typical page early in the novel: “Vernon Congers had been The Man at last summer’s Camp And 1, where flashy play—‘hot dogging’—was encouraged”; “In fact, being white, he had gotten even more ‘pub’—publicity.”)
The problem is a matter of genre. Wolfe is a novelist who doesn’t really believe in the project of the novel; he’s writing social analysis while deploying some of fiction’s tools. His characters lack interiority, by which I mean they lack nuance, subtlety, the ability to surprise others or themselves with their thoughts or desires. One of I Am Charlotte Simmons’s major characters, Jojo Johanssen, is a white player on a predominantly Black team. And that’s pretty much all you need to know about Jojo, since that’s pretty much the only prism through which he experiences the world. On one page, he notices how a rival player’s “chocolate brown skin bulged with muscle on top of muscle.” On another, he sees “a chocolate brown giant with a shaved head.” An even more telling, because less significant, example: “As Jojo entered the room, four black players…were standing around in front of Charles’s locker.” These are Jojo’s teammates. Why would he see them, first, always, and explicitly, as “black” players? When battling for a rebound, he can’t see another arm reaching for the ball; he must see another Black arm reaching for the ball. This simply isn’t how consciousness works in real time—and it’s certainly not how an NBA prospect, who would have played with and against Black players for years, would experience the world. But Wolfe is more interested in saying something (not particularly interesting) about race in America than in exploring how people actually experience race in America.
I Am Charlotte Simmons dramatizes the seductions of sex, money, education, and success. But it fails at the novel’s primary task of seduction: to get the reader to believe in a fictive world and the characters who somehow live within it despite not really living at all.
