Pella and Irma, two classmates at Westish College, in Wisconsin, are the best of friends. Pella, a newly engaged divorcée and former wild child, has just graduated. Irma, several years younger, is a rising academic star, a scholarship student from a rural Catholic family, so unhip that her lack of touch is its own form of cool. Together, they’ve been in weekly independent-study sessions, reading authors such as Edith Wharton, for the past three years. But if they’re such good friends—why aren’t they talking? Sure, Pella is planning her friend Owen’s wedding, and Irma is gearing up for her senior year. But that doesn’t explain the sudden distance between them, or why the reclusive Irma made the uncharacteristic decision to go to the big parties that open Westish’s school year without telling Pella.
“The Brightness” (Little, Brown), Chad Harbach’s new novel, clocks in at nearly seven hundred pages, but the bulk of it follows Pella and Irma over the span of a few late-summer days in 2015. At Owen’s wedding, Pella’s engagement falls apart and her friendship with Irma seems to reach a breaking point. At Westish, Irma participates in a prank that is meant to draw awareness to sexual assault on campus. The rest of the book covers the subsequent nine months, in which the two women navigate the fallout of these events, Pella from New York and Irma from Westish, only to be reunited toward the end.
By this point, they have assumed the same aimlessness. Pella isn’t getting married, Irma isn’t going to grad school, and neither of them has a job, let alone a career. Unlike other people they encounter throughout the book—people who have shaped themselves and climbed professional heights—there is something unfinished about Pella and Irma. They’re always becoming, never being. Usually, when people don’t grow up, something has gone awry: they didn’t get to, they didn’t plan to, or they have simply delayed as long as possible. With others, though, resistance to a sleek and defined persona is fundamental. Like curly hair that must be ruthlessly flat-ironed into submission—both our heroines have such hair, though Irma’s is “frizzy,” which means curly but unhappy—these people push back against any form in which they find themselves, even if they chose it.
Readers of Harbach’s first novel, “The Art of Fielding” (2011), will recognize some of these names: Pella, Owen, Westish College. That’s because “The Brightness” is its metafictional sequel, with the premise that the previous book was written by Owen as a roman à clef. This conceit allows Harbach to trace the development of not just his characters but his own work, through the reception of Owen’s book and through the way Westish students discuss his other authorial proxy, Edith Wharton. Irma, for instance, adores Wharton but nonetheless engages in a little trash talk: “Wharton’s world is too narrow. . . . I mean, Wharton is flawless at describing the world she sees—but the world she describes is restricted to what she can see, and see readily. She never gropes around in the darkness—she never reaches toward the numinous.”
Throughout “The Brightness,” characters dismiss ambitious realist novels, whether historical or contemporary in concern, as “not exactly the news about how we live” or as bland, “mashed-potato realism.” The middlebrow realist is a master technician, a superb replicator of experience, but neither more nor less than this. These statements—coming as they do in the pages of a large, enjoyable novel that could be called quasi-historical and even accused of having a “whole boring ‘plot’ ”—begin to suggest a preoccupation with whether such novels are worth anyone’s time. The existence of the book says yes; the characters within it say maybe.
Irma has been avoiding her friend for a simple reason: she’s been busy planning her prank. At the parties that ring in the school year, two of her accomplices apply temporary tattoos that say “RAPE VICTIM” onto passed-out athletes’ foreheads. Then Irma publishes a manifesto in the campus newspaper under the moniker Witches of Westish. Once a video of one of the athletes freaking out goes up online (“I’M A DUDE! I WAS NOT SEXUALLY ASSAULTED!” he screams), what starts as a feminist protest becomes a national story, with one of the victims appearing on a Fox News show hosted by a floppy-haired man named Hunter Stroman.
Perhaps because it avoids a situation in which someone is actually raped, “The Brightness” portrays this particular kind of youthful political action with a touching mixture of the high-mindedness, impishness, bravado, self-aggrandizement, and pointlessness that such events really contain. The Witches of Westish want attention, which they get but are unprepared to handle; the athlete who goes on Fox News wants his pride back but instead swings a national spotlight onto Dahlia, a pranker who is suspended; the college administration just wants this whole problem somehow not to be a problem, which is impossible. Celebrities get involved—Lana Del Rey wears a sweatshirt that says “FREE DAHLIA”—as do feminist media startups (such as the titular Brightness), but, as far as campus-rape prevention goes, nothing is accomplished. Some people make money, some people use the buzz to shore up a brand, and some people get their lives wrecked, but who falls into this last category comes down to bad luck more than to justice.
Irma views both herself and her friends as bystanders to the main issue, campus rape; they are raising awareness but otherwise not involved. As events get out of control, though, Irma realizes that her friend Dahlia wants them to. Whenever offered a chance for rapprochement, Dahlia escalates. Her chosen victim, earnestly seeking to understand why she did what she did, tries to have a conversation with her, but she refuses so that he will take his complaints to the administration. Irma’s slow recognition that Dahlia has something different at stake here, as well as the inevitable reveal of what that “something different” happens to be, is delayed because Irma, for all her intelligence, can’t put together why an upbeat, confident classmate might suddenly become moody and self-destructive. Irma lives in a world in which people are fundamentally kind and good. There are things she cannot see and does not understand. Instead, what she sees when she looks at Dahlia is somebody who is fearless to the point of neglecting herself, and part of their friendship lies in how comforting this lack of comprehension is for Dahlia.
The fictional models Harbach cites, both within the text (such as Wharton’s story “The Pelican”) and in interviews (such as “Anna Karenina”), are attentive to social judgments and situations. They are about just and unjust ostracism, the delicacy of one’s reputation, who gets away with things and who doesn’t. They understand that human relationships and human interiority both exist within a world, and this world constrains not only what people do but what they can even regard as possible. Harbach is a gifted observer of undergraduates, their pathos and their comedy, but his Westish is a gentle and perhaps too-good-natured institution, where even the jocks are nerds. This means that the larger social dynamics created by rape—even the prospect of rape—in small, intimate communities go unconsidered. There is no one genuinely malicious at Westish, and thus none of the moral compromises one finds at an actual college: the friends who take sides, which usually means picking the person who’s less trouble; the real but unspoken feeling that sexual assault may be an inevitable part of freewheeling social life; the surreal experience of being in a class about “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” with someone you know to have hurt other people. The singular strangeness of studying at a small college is striving not to know what you know about somebody else, for the sake of higher learning, or at least for the peace of the classroom. These kinds of forces, which explain why students behave in the self-warping ways that they do, are missing, as is the sense that people are ever constrained by something beyond their own quirks of personality or individual delusions.
Meanwhile, back at Owen’s wedding, old friends and enemies reunite, dance, drink too much, and go to bed with the wrong people. Here, again, Harbach demonstrates a profound gift for observing individuals and their relationships. His depiction of the wedding is replete with the sort of tiny triumphs and failures of these occasions: comparing yourself with an old classmate and feeling like a loser, comparing yourself with a younger person and feeling like you wasted your potential, ending up in a group at the end of the night you’d never have chosen and will never see again. Pella, for her part, spends the night obsessed with proving herself to be a flourishing adult. She helped Owen write his book, and helped him plan this wedding, but knowing that she “had once again played the supportive editorial role” means that she is filled with a sense of resentment. She fawns on an old high-school friend, then steals the attention of a guy the friend likes. She is embarrassed by her fiancé’s physical unself-consciousness—he’s at peace with his balding and weight gain, his sunscreen is applied all wrong—as if this somehow reflects poorly on her. Can she really be impressive if she’s with a man who just wants “a grilled cheese of a woman, salty, filling, and cheap”?
Collapsing relationships are the bread and butter of many an insightful novel. But Harbach also captures a more delicate thing in his depiction of Owen and Pella: the frustration that exists between a successful artist and a less successful friend who feels instrumental to that success. Pella envies Owen and secretly enjoys things like a negative review that compares his book to morphine, even as she lives vicariously through the praise and attention he receives. She knows that Owen hasn’t done her dirty, professionally speaking, but still feels neglected.
Once again, though, there’s a social aspect to the proceedings that Harbach avoids, this time not by leaving things out but by insufficiently considering what he’s put in. As mentioned, “The Art of Fielding” is a real novel in “The Brightness.” Various lines make clear that it should be regarded as nearly identical to Harbach’s book. That means it’s a book about two things: first, Henry Skrimshander, a talented Westish shortstop who gets the yips, and, second, Owen’s love affair with the president of the college (who was also Pella’s father). Owen seems to have made no changes to events as they happened. Nevertheless, his “Art of Fielding,” like Harbach’s, is treated by critics as a “roseate” work of old-fashioned realism.
The problem is that Owen’s book would not be received as comforting and old-fashioned. It would be seen as a work of merciless autofiction in the vein of Karl Ove Knausgaard, and it would be discussed, as his books are, as aggressive, antisocial, and spiteful. Despite almost everyone at the wedding having read Owen’s novel, he faces no social fallout: there is no frustration at his depiction of the school and his peers, and no paranoia about whether he’ll expose them further. More to the point, such a book would simply not be described by critics as full of “comforts,” and “The Brightness” is too concerned elsewhere with the way discourses play out online to ignore the debates a work of barely disguised fiction about sleeping with your closeted college president would create. The only person who responds to it in a way that seems even remotely accurate is, oddly, Hunter Stroman, who calls it a novel about being “groomed for gay sex by the sixty-year-old president of [Owen’s] college.”
“The Brightness” suffers from its own problems with thin disguises. The Times is the Times in this book, Vice is Vice, the TV show “Girls” is the TV show “Girls,” and Lana Del Rey is Lana Del Rey. On the other hand, there are women’s websites named the Termagant and the Napkin, a designer label named Jane and Janet, a publication named the SoHo Review, and, of course, a Fox News host named Hunter Stroman. Every time a new, media-adjacent name appears, it’s unclear whether what you’re encountering is a fictional invention or an inside joke. In a conversation before Owen’s wedding, a character dismisses a forthcoming novel as a “period piece” by quipping, “The characters are always humming old advertising jingles. And the price of everything is repeated ad nauseam: ‘Oh goodness! Three shillings six for a jiggery-joo!’ ” But if such an effect was what Harbach sought to avoid by not saying “Jezebel,” “The Hairpin,” or “Tucker Carlson,” he sacrificed a much more important sense of social reality. The titular Brightness, for instance—a women’s media startup that was founded by an actress, and that publishes a mixture of glossy fashion content, aggregated slop, and barely edited confessional pieces—represents a kind of corporate girl power that the reader, sitting at the lofty vantage point of ten years later, knows isn’t heading anywhere except off a cliff. For the characters, though, it’s just a website, and, as glamorous as the media world it represents seems, neither Pella nor Irma wants to join it. It is neither an aspiration nor a temptation; it is not a friend or an enemy; it is just indistinctly there.
These flaws are all the more frustrating because so much of “The Brightness” is beautiful and perceptive. Irma, in particular—who has abandoned her rural Catholic roots but still appears to others as a confusing aesthetic mix of Fox News and flower child, “starch and eccentricity . . . shrewdness and innocence”—is a wholly convincing portrait of someone who is fiercely loyal to her family and their values (despite being at odds with them) but who also feels alternately freed and imprisoned by her own singularity. She is depicted without a trace of condescension, and her struggles with her identity can’t simply be chalked up to a restrictive childhood. They are existential problems that are represented seriously:
You couldn’t be a sexual being and also be Irma; you couldn’t be a woman and also be Irma; you couldn’t slash your hair in the darkness and also be Irma. You couldn’t be an intellectual and also a sexual being, or a woman, or a slasher of hair in the darkness. You could be an intellectual and yourself, but not without an irksome sense of narrowness, penury, and incompletion. You couldn’t enjoy, relax, have fun, take pleasure, cut loose, party, whatever you wanted to call it, embrace certain deep and Dionysian aspects of your being, without suspending your moral sense, and all too often it seemed your moral sense was all you had.
Passages like this one are not only a joy to read—they convey something fundamental about people, who are always in conflict with themselves, managing a jumble of desires that pull in wildly different and sometimes mutually exclusive directions. Irma is not going to resolve her dilemma by having sex or cutting loose, nor by renouncing such pastimes and doubling down on intellect. Her need to be multiple represents the tension that will run through the rest of her life, not something that can be reconciled to create a new, final, and perfect Irma. When she does have sex, she experiences the aftermath, too, as doubled: “a kind of grief-in-love, a losing-in-the-having. . . . A new kind of unloneliness, which now she could never unknow.”
The accusation levelled within “The Brightness” against novels that are stuck in the past, whether formally or through their subject matter, is that they are “not exactly bringing the news.” The proper response to this complaint is that novels do not bring the news; the news brings the news. This is as true of art that is experimental and political as of art that is old-fashioned. While in New York, Pella becomes smitten with the work of a feminist artist named Sylvie, especially a film called “Death of My Husband.” In it, Sylvie talks directly to a man standing behind her camera, who asks, “Would you consider killing one’s husband a revolutionary act?” Sylvie replies, “Revolutions just go round and round. I’ve been trying to become an artist.” At the end of the film, pregnant by a man she despises, Sylvie says simply, “There’s no way out.”
Art like Sylvie’s inherently contains two messages. Even if there’s “no way out,” the film’s existence says, “You’re not alone.” An artist is always becoming an artist, the same way Pella and Irma will always be becoming Pella and Irma. All works of art are addressed in part to people they cannot know, with problems they cannot understand. To prove that an old-fashioned book can be excellent, it isn’t necessary to dramatize arguments about the form. You need only a prose style, an interest in people, and a sense of society. In art as in sports, the best defense is a good offense. ♦