A well-written campus novel, but one that — despite early promise — doesn’t deviate much from the well-worn template
A creative writing professor at a third-tier college in upstate New York is on his way home from a summer fellowship in France, where he’s spent the last three months loafing around Bordeaux, tasting the many varieties of French wine at his disposal, and doing just about anything but actually working on his long overdue novel. A stopover in Brooklyn to see his and his wife’s closest friends — John, a jaded poet-turned-lawyer with a dubious moral compass, and Sophie, a once-promising fiction writer with a complicated past and a mysterious allure — causes further trouble when he and Sophie wind up sleeping together while John is out serenading Brooklyn coeds with poems instead of preparing legal briefs.
But instead of succumbing to his failures as a teacher, writer, and husband, an odd freedom begins to bubble up. Could a love affair be the answer he’s been searching for? Could it offer the escape he needs from the department chair, Chet Bland, who’s been breathing down his neck? Relief from the gossip of colleagues and generational tension with students? Respite from embarrassment over his wife, Debra Crawford, and her meteoric rise as a novelist? His escapades might even make the perfect raw material for an absolutely devastating novel, which would earn him tenure, wealth, and celebrity — everything he needs to be set for life. If only he could be the one to write it.
I’ve always been a fan of campus novels — ever since I read Richard Russo’s very good Straight Man (recently adapted into the limited series, Lucky Hank, starring Bob Odenkirk). Since then, Julie Schumacher has joined the ranks of my all-time favourite authors. My fond reading memories are populated by a good number of novels set on campuses. It is probably unsurprising, then, that when I had the chance to read and review Andrew Ewell’s Set For Life, I jumped at the chance. As it turned out, it’s a bit of a mixed bag.
To begin with, Set For Life showed a lot of promise. Ewell’s prose is pretty clearly excellent, and the novel is peppered with plenty of great turns of phrase and evocative passages. The characters are well-drawn, and for the most part realistic and vividly portrayed. The first half offers something a little different to the template that seems to be handed down from each generation of campus novel authors to the next. The final half-or-so of the novel, though, veers back to the template (complete with unlikely accident, animal event, and inevitable professional & personal life collapse).
The protagonist, John, is a little different to the typical debut-literary-fiction template: he’s a little older (i.e., not in his late-20s/early-30s, struggling to write his debut novel in the Big City), and feels stuck — something I felt I could relate to. The first half of the novel is a very readable and engaging account of a career, marriage, and mid-life that have stagnated. John is a realistic character: he’s highly flawed, self-involved, and quite jealous of his wife. Debra writes commercial fiction, which obviously means John and his literary peers look down on her work, while simultaneously coveting her commercial success and all the shiny things that go with that. John sees Debra’s writing career as parasitic, in a way, as she mines real-life events, news, and tragedies for her books. As the novel progresses, and John realizes that Debra is mining their life — specifically, everything about John, it seems — for her new novel, he feels violated and exposed. Not least, of course, because she has perfectly captured his essence of self-involvement, self-importance, and the affair he believes he’s been conducting covertly. The novel does ask some interesting questions about who owns a story — especially one’s own.
The most I read, the less I liked the protagonist — not so much that I hated him (we’re clearly not supposed to like him, and that’s a common, oft-well-executed approach to fiction), but I just stopped caring. I found that I didn’t care if he broke away and found happiness, a new professional post, nor finished his novel. I didn’t find Debra to be an unexpected heroine, bursting the bubble of self-involved toxic-male authors. She’s also a bit terrible. Many of the secondary characters, though, are very good and where the novel places its decency and humanity. Again, these aren’t unusual approaches to fiction — I like a good anti-hero as much as the next person. It was the fact that I just lost all interest in the final act. Which is a shame, because the first half showed so much promise of something new and unexpected in the (sub-)genre.
If you’ve never found a campus novel that you didn’t like, then by all means give this a read — I’m sure you’ll find plenty to like. There are a fair few observations that anyone who has been a student and/or teacher will find wryly amusing, if familiar. I wish I had more positive things to write about this one. I am, however, interested in reading whatever Ewell writes next — perhaps he’ll strike out in a more original direction in whatever oeuvre he tries next, and hold course.
*
Andrew Ewell’s Set For Life is due to be published by Simon & Schuster in North America, on February 6th, 2024.
Follow the Author: Goodreads
Review copy received via Edelweiss