Can an Author Love His Characters Too Much?

The idea that college is the place where you should reach your social peak is responsible for plenty of misery. As the characters in Chad Harbach’s new novel, The Brightness, exit those supposed best years, they try desperately to sell themselves on the story of their coming of age. In truth, the experience has left them mostly embarrassed and disappointed. Pella, who has just graduated from Wisconsin’s Westish College, barely leaves her house, cooking and cleaning and generally acting like a mother to everyone she knows. Her fiancé, Mike, took a job coaching the same Westish sports teams he played for a few years ago, a role that, he has decided, obligates him to keep going to the same college parties and drinking the same cheap beer. And her friend Irma, a senior and a brilliantly smart scholarship student with long, unmanageable hair that makes her look off-puttingly religious, is prone to feeling “horribly, bitingly lonely.”

Their crises might double as a self-critique of Harbach’s first book, 2011’s The Art of Fielding, a campus novel in the traditional sense that mythologizes its setting, a fictional liberal-arts school in Wisconsin with a tight-knit underdog baseball team given to philosophizing and (spoiler alert) destined to win the championship. The book, which involves many of the same characters as The Brightness, is often unabashedly fairytale, with love affairs, extremes of success and injury, and frequent references to Herman Melville—though the writing itself is far more conventional than the gloriously thorny and disorienting Moby-Dick. Even before its publication, it landed with gravitas: Famously, Little Brown paid Harbach, who co-founded N+1, a $665,000 advance.

If The Art of Fielding always was old-fashioned—“a novel from another, more innocent age,” a Guardian reviewer wrote at the time—15 years later, it seems even older. And yet somehow very young: noticeably pre-Trump, pre–Me Too, pre–mainstream autofiction, and pre–a whole lot of other things, with few female characters and a romance between two men, a student and the college president, that strains plausibility and taste. (“I’ll be your gay mulatto roommate,” one of its participants announces early on.) It can be transportive, filling its campus with a generously imagined cohort of deep-thinking baseball players. But the worshipful asides about Melville reminded me of when a boyfriend who went to the great-books school St. John’s College told me its students were forbidden from writing their senior projects about one, and only one, work: Moby-Dick.

In the world of Harbach’s follow-up (a sequel of sorts, though it can be read on its own), The Art of Fielding was written by that gay student, Owen Dunne, who is now a best-selling author living in Brooklyn. “Westish, as he rendered it, became a place so sweet and lovely Pella barely recognized it,” and Harbach, as though acknowledging his own possible oversweetness, takes the opportunity to rework some of his first book’s more self-consciously novelistic names: In The Brightness, the shortstop Henry Skrimshander is actually Henry Skramstad; Pella’s last name is Affenlicht when in Owen’s book it was Affenlight: “Everything had been burnished and smooth—even the hard Germanic licht of her last name had softened, turned to light, as though she’d moved to Hollywood.” At one point, Pella reads part of a negative review of Owen’s Art of Fielding that sounds a little like a negative Atlantic review of Chad’s version. (In the book, at least, Owen is gracious, or insane, enough to invite the reviewer to coffee and befriend him.)

The action starts at the beginning of the school year in 2015, with fiancés Pella and Mike drifting away from each other just as Owen is about to get married in Rhode Island. But before that, Irma Friske and two of her friends—though she’s barely sure if they really like her—carry out a small act of feminist terrorism, writing “rape victim” on the foreheads of a couple of drunk college boys in slow-fading jagua ink. When they wake up and realize what has happened to them, the boys are furious and confused, and a video of one of them screaming goes viral. The trio writes a manifesto for the school paper, and a feminist website called The Brightness catches wind of the scheme and spreads their message; so does a conservative cable-news commentator, who calls them “harpies with Sharpies.” 

The targeted men were chosen more or less randomly, with the idea being that “it can happen to anyone,” as firebrand co-conspirator Dahlia puts it. Their panicked reactions are exactly the point. But they are both student athletes, and soon Mike is involved too, trying to cover up the drama and muttering angrily about Irma and the divisiveness of these campus feminists. “‘Owen, you know Westish sports as well as anybody,’” he says at one point. “Do you think our school has some kind of’—he searched for the phrase he’d repeatedly heard—‘toxic jock culture?’” It’s an affront to the idea that “We Are One,” the chummy Westish motto that Mike happened to coin.

The somber, strangely charismatic Irma is the novel’s most endearing character, but its guerrilla-feminist plotline wavers in and out of believability, and you can sense Harbach holding something back even as he wades gamely into a story that’s very different from The Art of Fielding’s investigations of male bonding. The group’s provocations are necessary, but Westish, it seems, remains a “sweet and lovely” place, and they really are all one, more or less: There was a campus rape a couple of years before the events of the book, but that student was expelled, and another sexual assault we learn about later was committed by someone who’s not present except as a name. The novel’s interest lies in the innocents on both sides of the divide, in the question of how to repair and understand one another. That can seem inadequate. Why open up this line of inquiry, one has to wonder, if you are too protective of your characters to truly implicate any of them?

It’s a relief to get off campus, away from the aggrieved jocks and into a different world: Owen’s extravagant Block Island wedding to a wealthy man named Martin, which is going to be a full-page spread in the Times Style section. We’re at the party for just about a hundred pages—The Brightness, in its old-fashioned, somewhat unnecessary way, is 657 altogether—and the gradually unfolding scene is languorous and populated, with Mike pouting in the corner, Pella longing to do something daring, Irma an object of fascination in a white lace dress that was her grandmother’s. There are old friends, artists, impolite New Yorkers (“Have fun, I guess?” says one. “Is that a thing people say?”), perverted uncles, brassy aunts, two babies “who wailed in an escalating duel.” In an interesting flourish, Henry, The Art of Fielding’s star shortstop and more or less that novel’s protagonist, shows up for just a few moments and then disappears. I still feel that not all of Harbach’s lines land—how many times can he describe Mike’s “big hands”?—but some really do, like when Pella notices how a storm the night before is followed by a southwest breeze that, like “a stealthy stage crew or catering staff, swept away the drooping fog.”

This long scene, which takes place in the middle of the novel, is a hinge in the story and also where most of the best action takes place. “Beware your destination,” Pella thinks glumly as the sun sets. “This party was a horizon toward which she’d been hurling herself, as though arriving here would reveal to her what came next and open a portal through which she could advance.” But by twilight, at least, she has nothing of note planned for her life. What she doesn’t know yet is that the party will become a portal, putting its guests into unexpected new configurations that will dramatically remake them. Here, the book loosens its grip on its wholesome view of the Westish clique, letting its characters do several ugly and petty and longed-for things—letting them, in other words, grow up.