Tag Archives: College Life

College Girl by Patricia Weitz

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Synopsis:
UConn transfer student Natalie finds that her lack of worldly experience can’t stand up to the pressures of a hot frat brother.

Review:
College Girl is really just a poor woman’s I Am Charlotte Simmons. I didn’t get sucked into Natalie’s story the way I had hoped to, because I usually love these kinds of tales, and I found myself frustrated with her relentless passivity (which she shares with Charlotte, but Wolfe made this almost an heroic quality in his heroine). Believe it or not, I read it in an evening, mostly because I didn’t want to have to pick it back up in the morning. If it were longer, I would’ve just stopped reading but it was so short I figured I’d see it through.

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The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay (The Fionavar Tapestry, Book One)

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Synopsis:
Five Toronto college students are pulled into an alternate world where they discover their true destinies at the outset of a war that could affect all worlds, including their own.

Review:
Yep, another hard-to-synopsize epic fantasy book. The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay employs one of the standard fantasy templates–ordinary people drawn into an extraordinary world–making the book “execution dependent.” That means that Kay has to work twice as hard to make the story feel fresh and exciting. Continue reading →

Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk

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Synopsis:
A headstrong Upper West Side yearns to escape her family’s Jewish Bronx origins and become a Broadway star.

Review:
This is the third or fourth time I’ve read Marjorie Morningstar, and every time I find myself absolutely riveted for the first two-thirds, then bored and indifferent for the final third, only to be knocked out by the epilogue. The book is rich with details and some astonishing set pieces–such as Seth’s bar mitzvah–but it’s hollow at the core. It’s as if author Herman Wouk gets tired of Marjorie’s adolescent angst, and all of a sudden the book puts on Mom’s high heels and pearls–and they’re just too big. Continue reading →

Sunless by Gerard Donovan

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Synopsis:
Bereft and aimless, an ex-meth head signs up to test a new drug promising to cure anxiety of all kinds.

Review:
I picked up Sunless because it promised a Chuck Pahlaniuk-esque satirical romp through all the woes of our modern age, dressed up in off-kilter post-apocalyptic trappings and with an addictive prose style.

Instead, I suffered through a lazily written, incoherently plotted, almost aggressively aimless stylistic exercise that I had to force myself to finish reading. Thankfully it’s not very long, so I could get through it in a subway ride. There was no forward movement in the plot, and since there was a plot, author Gerard Donovan can’t hide behind the “it’s about character” defense. Nor was the prose such that I wanted to keep reading just to see what he’d do with language–while that’s not my favorite kind of read, I can at least appreciate someone who loves words and wants to push them to the limit.

No, Sunless wants to be what I initially hoped it would be, and fails miserably.

Unhooked by Laura Sessions Stepp

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Synopsis:
A dissection of hook-up culture on college campuses and in high schools, including anecdotal accounts.

Review:
More hand-wringing than Last Night in Paradise, less high-minded than Unprotected, Unhooked is more likely than either to provoke fear and consternation in the hearts of parents of teenagers across America–particularly if they’ve read I Am Charlotte Simmons and their daughter is looking at Duke University. Continue reading →

Last Night in Paradise by Katie Roiphe

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Synopsis:
A look at sexual mores in the age of AIDS.

Review:
I like a good polemic as much as the next person, particularly when it involves people having lots of sex, mostly because I always feel like that’s nice work if you can get it. Last Night in Paradise isn’t hard-hitting investigative journalism as much as it’s an apologia for all the sex that Roiphe and her friends had in the 80s and 90s: “look, we may have slept around but we are always scared we got AIDS, so that doesn’t make us sleazy like swingers in the 1970s.” Roiphe herself calls this a kind of Puritanism, yet she succumbs to it in almost every chapter, talking about how she herself worries that she’s slept with too many people, or wondering whether or not she and her friends can handle the emotional ramifications of all that “safer sex.” She never quite seems to leave the Upper East Side private school world that she herself came from, and tends to see her experiences as representative of the general population. Her astonishment that anyone would voluntarily choose abstinence belies her inability to consider that there are other perspectives on sex than her own. Continue reading →

The Harrowing by Alexandra Sokoloff

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Synopsis:
While stranded on campus over Thanksgiving break, 5 mismatched students use a Ouija board to inadvertently conjure a demon from the dawn of time. Continue reading →

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Blindness by Henry Green

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Synopsis:
A young man on the verge of university is blinded in a freak accident.

Review:
Henry Green’s later books Loving, Living, and Party Going were referenced quite a bit in Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, but I chose to start with Blindness because it was listed in the infamous 1001 Books to Read Before You Die. It’s a slim volume, and I breezed through it, though Green’s marvelous turns of phrase caused me to pause and relish. Continue reading →

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Unprotected by Anonymous, MD

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Synopsis:
A survey of the state of affairs in campus counseling, presenting the argument that sexual activity is being left out of the equation with disastrous results.

Review:
The full title, Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in her Profession Endangers Every Student, offers a very good sense of the writer’s agenda, and she provides a great deal of evidence to support her claims. The term “political correctness” seems designed to tip off the right that she’s “one of us,” but really it’s the politicization of sexuality on both sides of the aisle that leads to the sorts of scenarios that are causing her and her patients so much angst and pain. Continue reading →

I’ll Take You There by Joyce Carol Oates

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Synopsis:
A troubled, introspective young woman in college in the early 60s falls out of favor with her sorority sisters and into a troubled relationship with a black PhD candidate in philosophy.

Review:
Very typical Oates–claustrophobic first-person narrative from the POV of a woman with serious issues. The story is laced with philosophical arguments that are way less interesting than the arcana of sorority life. Once Anellia leaves the Kappa house, the book loses contact with the larger world, narrowing in on Anellia and Vernor’s twisted pseudo-love affair. Oates does such a good job of limning the world of pretty girls in pouffy dresses swilling beer with oafish boys that I missed them when they left the story. Continue reading →