A few decades ago, the British bookseller WH Smith began handing out an annual prize called the Thumping Good Read Award ... If such a prize existed for ambitious and bold-hearted realist literary fiction, Chad Harbach’s new novel, The Brightness, would be near — and possibly at — the top of this year’s pile ... So full of life, surprises, close observation, spiraling and interlocking plots, sharp new characters wheeling into view, striking set pieces, overlapping literary allusions and neo-Updikean craftsmanship ... The book has its flaws, including a slightly overdetermined quality (the neo-Updikean craftsmanship can get up your nose), an art-world subplot that feels extraneous and a slackening near the end. But it’s a worthy sequel.
You might think of this novel as a rebuttal or counterpoint to its forerunner, a book that replaces roseate campus fantasy with spikier societal conflicts ... Harbach has likely exposed himself to criticism by anatomizing feminist politics and assuming the perspectives of 20-something coeds, though I think his characterizations are generous and insightful ... The soul of The Brightness remains at Westish, which Mr. Harbach depicts with fewer illusions but no less love.
A large, enjoyable novel that could be called quasi-historical and even accused of having a 'whole boring "plot"' ... 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 ... 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 ... Suffers from its own problems with thin disguises ... These flaws are all the more frustrating because so much of The Brightness is beautiful and perceptive ... 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.
This is a big beast of a novel. Perhaps inevitably, the narrative sags in places due to tangential flashbacks and extended episodes and exchanges in which every detail, action, gesture, and impulse are recorded ... However, during the book’s more streamlined scenes, Harbach triumphs on various levels ... In Harbach’s hands, Pella emerges as a compellingly flawed creation.
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 ... It’s a relief to get off campus, away from the aggrieved jocks and into a different world ... I still feel that not all of Harbach’s lines land...but some really do ... 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.
Even longer and heavier than it appears ... Harbach goes there: in the world of The Brightness, his first novel is revealed to be Owen’s first novel (written with Pella’s help). Among other things, this means all of the characters in The Brightness that we think we already know are not quite those people ... Whatever metafictional fun this premiss might have permitted is quickly swamped by the pre-existing problems it exacerbates and the new ones it creates ... None of this would be so bad in an artfully constructed novel. But The Brightness meanders and lingers. Multiple promising starts seem to exist side by side, none seen though.
Yes, it’s been 15 years since Harbach’s beloved debut, The Art of Fielding. And yes, The Brightness clocks in at a forearm-fatiguing 672 pages (which may be a clue). But still, don’t ask why the long gap between books. Just be happy it’s here ... A very long novel that doesn’t feel long at all ... I wish this novel had been 700 more pages. And while there certainly is trilogy potential in where this leaves off, dammit, I sure don’t want to have to wait another 15 years to revisit Westish College.
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 ... Can’t quite seem to decide whether his subjects are half-baked pseudo-intellectuals or are perhaps worth taking seriously ... 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 ... Crammed with references to recent history: There are mentions of Trump and Bernie, Lana Del Rey and blogging ... It is at once clotted by nostalgia—for craft beer and little magazines—and totally dismissive ... Rather than coolly distant or artfully ambiguous, the tone of The Brightness often comes across as diffident ... Harbach’s judgments of this generation of women and their struggles can verge on cruel or seem pointless.
Poignant if baggy ... The novel’s hefty page count comes in part from extraneous plot threads and secondary characters who don’t add much to the story, but Harbach’s writing is consistently tender and often funny. Fans of The Art of Fielding and intrepid newcomers will find much to love.
