Illustration by Lily Qian.
In season six of Sex and the City, Carrie’s budding relationship with her new boyfriend, a novelist named Jack Berger, falls apart after they argue about an article of clothing that features prominently in his latest book. Carrie can’t get over the scrunchie. No New York woman, Carrie insists—especially the protagonist of his novel—would be caught dead wearing one. Berger dismisses her, but the argument still gnaws at him: He is keen to prove Carrie wrong, and he thinks he does when he spots a scrunchie-wearing woman at a “hip downtown restaurant,” but she ends up being a tourist. The fashion choices of early 2000s tourists aside, the entire fracas highlights a greater issue in their relationship: Why did he think he knew better in the first place?
The matter of the scrunchie is more than just a relationship mishap; one can’t help but wonder if Berger is all that competent in his chosen field. If he got the scrunchie wrong, how much else did he miss? Put another way, what is the proper barometer for judging realism in fiction: Is it meant to hold up a mirror to our world so that we might see it more clearly? Or more pointedly: What does Berger’s insistence say about his ability to understand and make claims on what women are like? Most readers might agree with Carrie here—that the scrunchie is not just a scrunchie, but a sign that Berger is a man (and a writer) whose sense of the world is not to be trusted.
In Chad Harbach’s new novel, The Brightness, we are transported back to 2015 and 2016, when the great signifying detail in the dress of urban millennial men is described as follows: “The trend in menswear” in this period “was toward an insinuation of gayness, in the form of slim striped tank tops and tight-fitting shorts.” We could debate what Harbach means by “insinuation,” but the point is clear enough: Truly fashionable dudes can see around the corner and have stocked up on big pants and flowing fabrics. And his idea of heterosexual male attractiveness flatters that of the putative novel reader: the kind of guy who wears “moss green jacket[s]” and “cognac boots” and writes book reviews for New York’s little magazines.
It’s the women of The Brightness—a mixed cohort of feminist students at Westish College, early-career editors and writers, and in one case the owner of a small brewery in Red Hook—whose modes of dress Harbach spends many pages describing. More than once, a student’s red lipstick is made to indicate her determination to court notoriety. The game of attention-seeking moves beyond makeup, Harbach tells us, because women, more than men, must think about how they look and what it says about them—whether it’s owning things like “wide-legged golden jumpsuits” or a vintage “kimono-like mini-wrap,” or knowing that “a certain shade of yellow, a rich pastured egg-yolk hue, [is] destined to rule New York that season.”
If Carrie compelled us to consider the scrunchie, what do we think Harbach is trying to do here? What does all this grousing about clothing say about that fateful year before the American lexicon expanded to include phrases like “shithole country” and “pussy hat”? Is he saying that we shouldn’t take for granted how easy we once had it? Does he mean to mourn these years? Or is his verdict on 2015 and 2016 much uglier—as ugly as a wide-legged golden jumpsuit?
Like many a campus novel before it, The Brightness begins with a prank. It’s the start of the school year at Westish, and before classes have commenced, frat row is crowded with revelers. Three students—Irma, Pammy, and Dahlia—have been talking all summer about making a statement at their little Midwestern school’s annual bacchanal, known as “the Parties.”
The three call themselves the “Witches of Westish.” And what they mean to expose is something rotten at the heart of the campus experience: what in the 2010s was often called “rape culture,” the latest moniker for a source of conflict and pain that every generation of college students has faced in one way or another, including today. (It should be no surprise that there remains little accountability on the matter within higher education, as the ongoing case of the Cornell 7 has recently made clear.)
To address the violence and assaults on their campus, the Witches of Westish set out to do a performance piece. Targeting a trio of incapacitated jocks at the Parties, they plan to stamp temporary tattoos on their foreheads that read “Rape Victim.” The next day, the jocks would wake up, look in the mirror, and discover the message imprinted on them, in ink that is very hard to wash off. They would be walking advertisements for the project’s goal: To make visible the sexual violence that pervades college life.
The Witches only manage to tattoo two of the jocks, because Irma is excused from her duties. She has too much to lose: A child of working-class rural Wisconsin, Irma is a scholarship kid, and the coven doesn’t want to risk screwing up her life. Her job instead is a more literary one: She is responsible for writing the Witches’ “manifesto,” which the college newspaper publishes soon after the men are tattooed. In a few weeks’ time, the prank makes the national news, and the Witches are famous, Dahlia most of all. After being suspended, she becomes, in short order, a martyr, then a blogger and podcaster for an online feminist magazine (à la Jezebel) called The Brightness. The other two Witches are noticed as well: At a wedding later in the novel, Irma is even offered the chance to write for The New Yorker.
That this might all sound a bit confusing is natural—Irma, our guide for most of the novel, spends her last year of college utterly bewildered—by her future, by all the attention, by desire. Yet the fact that this opening set piece might be more than a little ridiculous is perhaps the point. In many ways, The Brightness bears a striking resemblance to Tom Wolfe’s 2004 novel I Am Charlotte Simmons—a bleak right-wing satire of campus politics in which Wolfe targeted what he felt to be the crass sexual mores and hollow politics of university students. But Harbach’s handling of the Witches’ scheme is more curious: He can’t quite seem to decide whether his subjects are half-baked pseudo-intellectuals or are perhaps worth taking seriously.
What is stranger still is that the prank is only one of the novel’s many tangled plot lines, all which converge at a New England wedding to celebrate the nuptials of Owen Dunne, a young gay novelist who first appeared as one of the heroes in Harbach’s debut novel, 2011’s The Art of Fielding, and who has also written a critically acclaimed novel by the name of The Art of Fielding.
The veil between the two novels is lifted by Pella, another of the heroes of The Art of Fielding. In that book, Pella was 23, about to divorce her much older husband, and she landed at Westish looking for safe haven with her estranged father, the college’s president. By the novel’s end, her father has died after a heart attack (brought on, it is implied, by his invigorating affair with Owen), and Pella has shacked up with the captain of the baseball team, Mike Schwartz, and decided to get her life back on track by enrolling at Westish.
Four years have passed when we meet her again in The Brightness. Pella is now a recent graduate and engaged to Mike. She is also, we learn, best friends with Irma and was the first (but uncredited) editor of Owen’s now-successful novel. And despite publicly professing happiness for her friends, she feels somewhat used by them, or at least underappreciated, and her attraction to Mike has waned. The novel’s second (and, arguably, primary) plot involves Pella’s post-college life and her fumbling attempts at cultivating an identity away from the people she has helped nurture. And it should be no surprise that her bildungsroman is pockmarked by many indignities; more than any other character in this novel, Pella is a tragic figure.
The metafictional sleight of hand at the center of The Brightness lacks a certain elegance; it is hard to justify, I think, the need for an Art of Fielding Extended Universe. Still, it is worth pausing here to examine the binary that Harbach’s two books represent. The Art of Fielding is about male friendship and presents a vision of a nontoxic version of it, in which throwing a baseball and quoting Marcus Aurelius might allow men to find the best in each other. The Brightness, on the other hand, is about the mysteries of female friendship, which, in Harbach’s telling, is passionate, without logic, and guided by petty jealousies. Irma and Pella, the novel’s main dyad, spend most of the book apart, their friendship strained by the tattoo prank and what it says about their divergent ambitions: Irma is hungry for accolades and attention, while Pella is more than willing to follow a traditional path after having such a late start to her adulthood.
The two novels differ in another crucial way. The Art of Fielding was confined to what took place either on the baseball diamond or on the campus itself; it made no attempt to supply its readers with an argument about the state of the world at the time. Certainly, a lot was happening in 2012 that was on the minds of college-age kids: America had yet to recover from the 2008 financial crisis, though the anger and sense of precarity that suffused the elder members of the millennial generation are completely absent from that novel’s idyll. In part, that separation from the world was to the novel’s benefit: It allowed The Art of Fielding to be charming and spritely precisely because of its light touch and its pleasing accounts of baseball; indeed, Harbach marked himself as one of the most talented describers of the act of fielding itself—the fluid beauty of a shortstop at work. The world, by contrast, weighs down The Brightness. Leaving aside all the acrobatic leaps required to make the novel fit within the fictional world of its predecessor, The Brightness is crammed with references to recent history: There are mentions of Trump and Bernie, Lana Del Rey and blogging, and, of course, all of those clothes and Harbach’s many thoughts on how people looked and acted in the 2010s.
The accumulation of proper nouns and era-specific details invites us to judge Harbach’s rendering of the 2010s against our own experience.
Granted, my own sense of things is very much defined by the fact that I was a college student during the years Harbach is writing about. I am therefore either the ideal or the worst possible reader of this novel. I find that it is at once clotted by nostalgia—for craft beer and little magazines—and totally dismissive (lest we forget how Harbach feels about skinny jeans or red lipstick) of the years it has chosen to ruminate on. Rather than coolly distant or artfully ambiguous, the tone of The Brightness often comes across as diffident. The treatment of its two central characters, Irma and Pella, exemplifies this ambivalence. Harbach is especially unsure of his feelings toward these women: They are brilliant and beautiful and beacons of a possible future, but they also get dragged through the mud, humiliated over and over again. Their fitful struggles to “find themselves” might serve as fuel for the plot’s engine, but Harbach’s judgments of this generation of women and their struggles can verge on cruel or seem pointless.
We spend hundreds of pages with Irma and Pella, line after line devoted to what’s going on inside their heads, and yet their psychological complexities often boil down to the question of whether to commit one’s life to making art or to making a family. Irma chooses the former, Pella the latter, but both paths leave them insecure at the novel’s end. At one point, after much agita, Irma concludes: “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.” Ultimately, this same binary casts its shadow on Pella’s story. She knows some clock is ticking (“When the powers that be get bored and move on, that’s when things get really bad. Then you have to figure out how to be something other than the thing you’ve spent your whole life trying to be,” she says at one point), and she upends her life trying to outrun what she feels to be the forces of some shabby fate.
These tortured lines of thought are meant to signal that both women are working through something, that once they can reconcile the contradictions of mind and body, they may finally be able to enter the world. Or, alternatively, these contradictions can’t be reconciled—that to achieve the thing one wants also requires denying other lives that could be lived, other ways of being. But are either of these points all that terribly revealing? And who is Irma, really? What we know of her is that she wants to do well, and she wants to be liked; she wants to have the right opinions and, ideally, to elicit the respect of the public at large. She is quirky and culturally literate—she even named her cat Anderson Cooper!—but all we learn about Irma is that her hardships across these pages have left her with a dangerous feeling: the desire to write a novel.
Pella’s fate is even worse. By the end of The Brightness, she has left Mike for Nick, a freelance writer by night and accountant by day whom she meets at Owen’s wedding. This is no act of liberation either: “The Most Fucked Man in America,” Pella learns, isn’t exactly a catch. Despite it all, she rushes headlong into the relationship, in part because she is drawn to Nick’s mother, a reclusive and retired feminist artist named Sylvie. It is Sylvie who imparts the novel’s great lesson: You can make art, or you can make babies, but if you do both, one will negatively influence the other, no matter what. A stark lesson indeed—especially since the product of Sylvie’s own toils is that worst of all things, a book critic. Nick is also, unbeknownst to him, a father to be: Pella learns that she is pregnant in the novel’s final pages and decides that a family—with or without Nick—is what she wants. So after hundreds of pages, we are left with a choice as old as the novel itself: book or baby?
That these are the two paths on offer might leave some readers feeling a bit insulted, but Harbach, for just a moment, indulges in the idea that our heroes can have it both ways. There are half-joking hints that the two, together, can fashion a world in which they could raise the future child and future novel without the assistance of men: “I could help with your book, you could help with my baby,” Pella says to Irma. She thinks to herself, flying high on this dose of utopia, that “friendship could be a looser, freer realm within which to try the tender experiment of living and of nurturing life—away from the structures and strictures, the painful overemphasis, attached to romantic love.” Just as quickly, Irma casts some doubt: “A world without men,” she says with a dash of irony. And Pella laughs: “Maybe not entirely.”
We are told, though, that “this new life continued to unfurl in Pella’s mind” and that maybe, just maybe, she and Irma might find a loophole, one less preordained than the novel might imply. Yet if this is where we end up, why have us marooned in the 2010s at all? It could be that stalking such optimism is the sense that in just a few weeks, and for years to come as well, the world will change, and whatever future these women imagine for themselves and their progeny will be all but foreclosed. That like the clothes, the hopeful sentiments of 2015 and early 2016 were passing ones, and that the choices before us today are not as simple as book or baby.
Kevin LozanoTwitterKevin Lozano has written for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Dissent, and elsewhere and is a former associate literary editor.