5 days ago
Campus antics: Seduction Theory, by Emily Adrian, reviewed
There is a fine tradition of campus novels that stretches from Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945) and Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954) through Donna Tartt's The Secret History (1992) and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) to Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding (2011) and Kiley Reid's Come and Get It (2024). Emily Adrian's Seduction Theory, her fourth novel for adults, shows the author's awareness of her predecessors in the genre. One of its main characters even regards Pnin (1957), a campus novel by Vladimir Nabokov, as his comfort book.
Ethan, the character in question, feels he needs comfort because he has cheated on his wife with their secretary. He is married to Simone, and the two are goodlooking creative writing professors at Edwards University in upstate New York. Adrian herself taught creative writing at Sewanee, the University of the South. In Seduction Theory, Simone is the star of the marriage, admired for her bestselling memoir Motherless, as well as for 'her 54,000 followers, her cheekbones'. Ethan, in contrast, is 'aware of being a novelist who hadn't sold a book since he was 26' and, to make matters worse, his one novel retold the story of Simone's memoir.
The novel opens during an aggressively hot summer. At a party given by a colleague of the couple, everyone seems preoccupied by sex. The host even mentions that her dog is named Humbert Humbert, from Nabokov's Lolita (1955), because 'we discovered he hates females his own age but loves puppies'. Ethan leaves with Abigail, the secretary whom he shares with his wife, to buy cigarettes. What follows may not be original, but Adrian manages to make the story propulsive. The twist is that Simone is herself having an 'emotional affair' with a graduate student called Roberta Green.
Any reader paying attention will have noted that on the novel's first page we are told we are reading Roberta's 'Thesis Submitted to Edwards University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts'. But the story that follows is so engrossing, it is easy to put this to one side. In fact in the final third, when Roberta inserts herself into the centre of the narrative, the novel falters. Even she comments: 'Maybe I'd mistaken myself for the protagonist when I'd only ever been comic relief.' Before this meta-literary device comes to the fore, Seduction Theory is a juicy story of how two people in a 'deeply rewarding' marriage had separately decided to press the self-destruct button. And Adrian – who presumably understands the febrile nature of campus life better than most – is well-equipped to write it.
