Geoff Mills

Big Trouble on Little Campus

The Devil and Webster

By

Faber & Faber 358pp £12.99 order from our bookshop

What happens when college president Naomi Roth, an erstwhile radical whose mantra has always been ‘speak truth to power’, finds herself the subject of a student protest? This is the conflict, both public and personal, at the heart of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s latest novel. At an elite liberal arts college in New England, a ‘halcyon, evolved, rarified, creative, and intellectual college campus, where you are free to learn and nap and make things and have sex and get high and change your fucking gender even’, a disruptive and dangerous force erupts. Thus we are drawn towards a classic motif of the campus novel: paradise disrupted.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'It would be nice to think that women will achieve equal pay in my lifetime, rather than to watch gloomily as stati… ,
    • In 1660, two of the signatories of King Charles I's death warrant fled across the Atlantic to New England. But were… ,
    • Howard Jacobson's sixteenth novel is 'a love story of sorts, one characterised not by physical desire or even conta… ,
    • 'The sudden immersion in the new and unfamiliar can lead people to write with a rare lack of self-consciousness' P… ,
    • 'Pools bend the rules. Clothes slip off, skin glistens, consciousness heightens. A dreamlike scenario unfolds' Jam… ,
    • 'Although he surely didn’t know W H Auden’s theory that every high C proclaims human freedom and our capacity to tr… ,
    • RT : With beginning tomorrow, we've uncovered a 1997 article from the archive reviewing 'Golf Dream… ,
    Follow Us