On an otherwise ordinary fall day on a university campus in Chicago, the toddler son of an ambitious divinity school professor named Adrian Bennett mysteriously starts to glow. The nimbus, as the strange, soft light comes to be known, offers no clues to its origin and frustrates every attempt at rational explanation. Though the nimbus appears only intermittently, and not to everyone, the otherworldly glow quickly upends the lives of all those who encounter it, including Paul Harkin, Adrian’s broke and feckless graduate student, who likes being a graduate student a little too much for his own good; Renata Bennett, Adrian’s omnicompetent wife, who can’t see her son glowing even though the nimbus is turning her life upside down; and Warren Kayita, a down-on-his-luck librarian and aging divinity school alumnus on the run from a violent criminal. As news about the nimbus spreads around the university and beyond, Adrian, Paul, Renata, and Warren are set on a collision course that will threaten their lives and put their deepest convictions to the test.
Baird can never quite transcend his academic way of framing and relativizing experience. The writing is thoughtful but wordy and diffuse. One wishes more poetic pressure had been brought to bear on the scenes. Some kind of revelation is at hand, but none of the characters in this tantalizing novel seem able to focus on it.
As a satire...uneven ... Baird admirably creates tension between the weighty metaphysical questions to which his characters have devoted their professional lives and the way they actually confront the mystical ... But as the scholarly arcana pile up, their function becomes muddied and ambiguous. The Nimbus is so intent on skewering its infinitely skewerable protagonists that they feel more like ciphers than fully developed characters. The satire loses complexity along with them.
Baird’s deconstruction of the reigning misogyny in higher education is salient, but his prose — for all its wit and self-awareness — ultimately feels like an intellectual exercise about the sexist and racist perils of academia rather than an immersive representation of them ... For all the lofty talk of religion and faith and academia, this is a novel about dirty work of parenthood — or rather, how parenthood collapses the binary of sacred and profane.
