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Spectator
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
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.
Mint
27-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Mint
In Katabasis, R.F. Kuang serves dark academia as literal hell
Dark academia is a sub-genre in fantasy fiction, often involving schools of magic, secret societies and evil experiments in the backdrop of a scholarly environment. But the darkest of dark academia novels is not fantasy at all—in Donna Tartt's The Secret History, the darkness comes not from magic but from human frailty. R.F. Kuang's much-awaited novel Katabasis (HarperCollins India) has much in common with Tartt's—ambitious, jealous, secretive academics; classical allusions; a growing grimness. But it's a hardcore fantasy novel that does something daring: it takes dark academia to its logical conclusion, literal hell. 'I am getting close to the end of a draft of 'Katabasis,' which comes out in 2025. It's another fantasy novel…," Kuang had told The Harvard Crimson back in 2023. 'It started as this cute, silly adventure novel about like, 'Haha, academia is hell.' And then I was writing it and I was like, 'Oh, no, academia is hell.'" Even without this useful cue card, I could tell that's where this novel—part satire, part adventure tale—was going with within a few pages. Set in an alternate universe where magic is an acknowledged though increasingly suspect force, Katabasis (which, in Greek mythology, refers to a hero's descent into the underworld) begins in Cambridge University, which has a department of 'analytic magick" ruled over by the talented and somewhat unscrupulous Professor Jacob Grimes. When Professor Grimes dies a gruesome death during a magical experiment, his PhD students Alice Law and Peter Murdoch decide to perform some forbidden and extremely risky magic of their own to descend into hell and fetch their adviser—so that he can sign their recommendation letters. This is not as far-fetched as it sounds—finishing a PhD, a culmination of years of tedium and insanely hard work, can seem like a matter of life and death to those brave enough to aim for it—and students of analytic magick have the added pressure of needing to find their footing in a world that scorns their discipline (like, say, students of literature in the real world today). Kuang does not shy away from drawing attention to the absurdity inherent in the situation. The most esoteric and philosophical descriptions of magic are bookended by ruminations on what the actual practice of it in academia entails—publishing papers, squabbling with peers for conference seats, vying for fellowships, gossip, backbiting and bitchiness. 'Success in this field demanded a forceful, single-minded capacity for self-delusion. Alice could tip over her world and construct planks of belief from nothing. She believed that finite quantities would never run out, that time could loop back on itself, and that any damage could be repaired," writes Kuang. In the same breath, she adds: 'She believed that academia was a meritocracy, that hard work was its own reward… that department pettiness could not touch you, so long as you kept your head down and did not complain." Talk about being delulu. It is an immutable law of fantasy novels that no matter how absurd the premise sounds, notwithstanding what the fantastic elements are an allegory of, the narrative has to be convincing enough for the reader to be enthralled by the hero's journey. We know that the predicaments Swift's Gulliver finds himself in are stand-ins for the evils in British society and politics, but we still care what happens to Gulliver. Susanna Clarke's astounding Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is a send-up of Victorian-era social structures, but it has edge-of-the-seat tension. Katabasis pulls this off, but only to a certain extent. It reminded me a few times of Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder, a treatise on the history of philosophy thinly veiled as a novel, in which the stakes never quite feel high enough—though Sophie, like Alice in Katabasis (and her namesake from Lewis Carroll's work, signposted by the author early), have many thrilling adventures and near-escapes. Still, Kuang has dreamt up a fresh version of hell that feels both unfamiliar and not. Spoiler alert: it manifests itself to Alice and Peter as a university, with its eight courts or circles representing one aspect of academia: a sinister library that initially seems enchanting but is ultimately an exercise in tedium, a student residence with continuous, mind-numbing sex, and so on. Our protagonists chart hell using the accounts of Dante, Orpheus and, in an admirable intellectual stretch, T.S. Eliot—Kuang posits that The Wasteland is basically a description of hell—taking them as literal descriptions rather than allegory. The book is endlessly inventive, much like Kuang's most celebrated novel, Babel, again an epic fantasy about a group of magicians in an alternate Oxford that is ultimately a critique of colonialism. Kuang is a very skilled writer who can layer these multiple, complex themes and narratives into coherent plots (though sometimes at the cost of character ) that are immensely readable and fun in spite of their length and denseness. Still, her best work, according to me, is the relatively slighter Yellowface, a contemporary novel about publishing that satirises the industry's penchant for trending ideas and themes. It is her most self-aware work, in a way that doesn't draw attention to its cleverness like Babel and Katabasis often do. Read this genre-defying, intellectually stimulating and often weird novel for its story, then, especially the glimpses of life before hell for its protagonists when they grapple with more mundane challenges than crossing a river of eternal oblivion. Hell is other people, said Sartre. No, hell is a college, says Kuang. The novel is forthcoming in August.
Belfast Telegraph
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Belfast Telegraph
‘I'll always be a Galway girl at heart... the best thing about it? The people, without a doubt!'
I love well written psychological suspense. One of the best books in this genre has to be The Secret History by Donna Tartt, which I've read and reread many times over the years. The language is sublime, the setting of leafy Vermont a character in itself, the atmosphere wonderfully ominous, the characterisation superb, and the plot a master class in suspense writing.
The Herald Scotland
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
From Dead Poets Society to Satanic rituals in Fife
When We Were Killers, apparently, fits snugly into a genre which has retrospectively embraced works as diverse as Dead Poets Society and the Harry Potter series. Intentionally or not, it takes place in 1992, the year of the publication of one of dark academia's foundational texts, Donna Tartt's The Secret History. When We Were Killers C.F. Barrington (Image: Head of Zeus) It's in that year that a young student named Finn Nethercott starts at St Andrews, not long after the traumatic experience of losing his whole family in a hillwalking accident. He has enrolled in the School of Divinity, though he has no plans to join the ministry, nor is he particularly religious. Finn likes old places, like stone circles and hill forts, locating his spirituality "in the natural world and in history". His esoteric interests lead to his adoption by a student group, the Clan Dal Riata, who explore altered states of mind by enacting rituals on hallucinogenic drugs. The Clan get together in sacred spaces to mark important dates in religious calendars, with a particular fondness for the Norse tradition, although they claim that all religions wind seamlessly together around a universal truth. They're led by the aristocratic Magnus and third-year student Madrigal (shortened to Madri), who share a privileged background and appear to be a couple. Laurie is the Clan's historian, the one who grounds their vision quests in his encyclopaedic knowledge of ancient religions. But the one who really pulls Finn into their circle is Hope, a striking, raven-haired American woman with eyes of sparkling copper, on whom Finn becomes hopelessly fixated. Together, they pull Finn deeper into ancient lore, picnicking at faerie lochs and camping at the ancient seat of Dal Riata, losing themselves in progressively wilder hallucinations in their attempts to rediscover the lost drug that induced ecstatic trances in the Viking Berserkers. Although they welcome Finn into the Clan and permit him to be inked with their shared tattoo, the others remain guarded and aloof. It's likely that Finn, with his awkwardness and repressed trauma, would be a misfit in any group he tried to join. But class tensions are clearly at play too, Magnus and Madri happy to let Finn participate, but only on their own terms. Meanwhile, their activities are not going unnoticed. Finn suspects he's being followed, and that his room was searched while he was out. His suspicion that there's a rival group in St Andrews that wants to stamp them out proves to be correct, even if the Clan are reluctant to tell him exactly why. The most straightforwardly decent person in the story is wholesome Divinity student Anna, who is genuinely concerned about Finn but cruelly sidelined by him as he becomes increasingly unmoored from normal life. But even if none of the other characters, including Finn, is particularly likeable, Barrington's fantastical and intriguing scenario is steeped in such a mood of impending disaster that we feel compelled to see it through to the end, even if only to see just how badly these people can screw up. If Finn himself is an uncomfortable reminder of what it's like to be young, stupid, and unable to help making terrible decisions, Barrington's version of St Andrews, accentuating its gothic mystery and splendour, makes the perfect setting for a story about long-established networks of privilege lurking behind a douce exterior.
Irish Times
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The Wildelings by Lisa Harding: Hard lessons in obsession, desire, abuse and power
The Wildelings Author : Lisa Harding ISBN-13 : 978-1526672919 Publisher : Bloomsbury Guideline Price : £16.99 Lisa Harding's third novel, The Wildelings, is set in a fictionalised Trinity College of the 1990s. Jessica and Linda – childhood best friends with a complicated dynamic – become embroiled in new relationships at Wilde University that teach them hard lessons about obsession, desire, abuse and power. The novel is told from Jessica's perspective across two timelines: in the present day she is discussing the traumatic events with a therapist who encourages her to write down everything that happened in chronological order. This written account of her Wilde days is where the story is most alive, energised and compelling. The artifice of the therapist's office scenes, however, disrupts the narrative flow and asks the reader to suspend too much disbelief as regards the plausibility of that construct. Memory does not unspool neatly like this. The reader is immersed in the dream-like surrealism, and high drama, of the 1990s before being interrupted by the therapist asking a question of Jessica as if she too is reading it in real time. With this device, the aim may have been deliberate absurdity, to underscore the character's philosophical quest to derive meaning from the past, but the execution nonetheless takes away more than it adds. Perhaps this framing was borne out of an anxiety that readers would struggle to feel empathy for Jessica – who, although drawn with great psychological acuity and depth, will inevitably be judged on her likeability. This problematic response from readers who struggle to engage or connect with flawed, and therefore human, women characters is an ongoing battle in publishing. READ MORE Harding's previous novels have demonstrated also that she is unafraid to write complex, contradictory, nonconforming women who are authentic products of their past hurts. This is to her great credit, and yet, placing her protagonist in a therapist's office where she must explain her behaviour may betray an anxiety that readers will struggle to understand Jessica without this exposition. [ 'I don't think there is anyone in Ireland whose life hasn't been touched by addiction' Opens in new window ] Harding's publisher is marketing this novel as one for fans of The Secret History by the Pulitzer Prize winner Donna Tartt . As in life, comparison is the thief of joy, and so they do Harding a disservice here by creating that expectation. Fans of Harding's previous novels, however, will not be disappointed as this novel is an excellent illustration of the writerly sensibilities that have won her past acclaim.
