Teddy Wayne’s third novel features a college student David Federman in his first year at Harvard who obsessively follows fellow student Veronica Morgan Wells, who is a feminist and who only seems to tolerate him even when she allows him to get closer to her. The book is more of a campus novel than a psychological portrait, but it is still striking as a depiction of a young man who wavers between moral nihilism, narcissism, and misguided moralism. The real reason to keep reading it is not for any insight it provides, or even for any commentary on modern campus politics, but rather for the stylized prose. When David first meets his college roommate, he comments, “All hopes I had of a roommate who would help upgrade me to a higher social stratum snagged on the gleaming barnacles of Steven’s orthodontia.” David is a well-educated and he has many observations to make about Harvard, its students, and the courses. David believes in nothing apart from getting Veronica to be with him, and he is willing to break rules and use people. But he isn’t quite Nietzschean since he is a mass of nerves and anxieties. His writing is addressed to Veronica, but he does not expect her to ever see what he writes. So his writing is really more to a wider audience, or to himself. While he does not care about any real principles, he still cares about impressing Veronica, and in order to do this, he feels he has to follow the rules of Bohemian intellectual life, and he has to make smart comments in his seminar classes. He goes to any extreme in order to achieve his goal, and often humiliates himself. There’s an element of dark humor in this, showing the difficulty of being an amoralist, at the same time as a satire of the modern university. It’s a striking and unusual book, but in the end it feels more like an exercise in writing and style. David’s cleverness feels like the book’s cleverness, without much substance.

© 2016 Christian Perring

Christian Perring will be working as an adjunct professor of philosophy in New York City in Fall 2016.