School Ties

Three fall novels make hay of academe, probing campus politics and intellectual foibles writ large

Collegiate environs have long been fertile ground for stories of queasy striving and paper-cutthroat behavior. I Am Charlotte Simmons. The Secret History. Lucky Jim. But as times change, so do the makes and models. In Muscle Man (Catapult), by Jordan Castro, misanthropic, protein-maxxing literature professor Harold skulks around Shepherd College, avoiding his basement classroom at all costs. The sight of his students calls to mind wriggling maggots, and he detests his colleagues, with the exception of the long-tenured Casey. In this study of masculinity and personal gain, when Casey goes AWOL and a suspicious backpack appears, Harold's equilibrium is further disturbed. When one hits rock bottom, it turns out there's always farther to fall.

Enter Katabasis (Harper Voyager). Best-selling author R.F. Kuang dabbled in the waters of ink-dark academia with her 2022 novel Babel, which takes place in a fantastical 19th-century Oxford (where, in this dimension, Kuang received her MSc) and tangles with translation and student uprisings. Katabasis descends, quite literally, even further into the quagmire. Following a spell gone wrong, Alice, a student of analytic magick at Cambridge University (where the author picked up an MPhil), endeavors to save her thesis adviser from hell—celebrating the wizardry of words while indicting the Danté-esque lengths to which advisers ask their acolytes to go.

The Unbroken Coast (Knopf), by Nalini Jones (sister to former VF editor in chief Radhika Jones), takes its professor protagonist out of the classroom and the reader back in time. In a largely Catholic Bombay village, Celia, the young daughter of a fisherman, and Francis Almeida, historian emeritus, literally collide when she flees a street vendor grabbing for her crucifix and runs headlong into the path of his bike. Their lives unfurl over decades, Bombay becomes Mumbai, and though a dementiaridden Almeida begins to lose his memories, his mark on Celia's future remains. It turns out there's life after teaching and still time to learn.

KEZIAH WEIR