Jean Hanff Korelitz

I do like the writing style of Jean Hanff Korelitz. She has a gift for describing clothes and food and interiors and I like all that detail. You may be familiar with Admission her enjoyable 2009 novel about the competitive world of Ivy League college admission. The new novel The Devil and Webster returns to academia and the central character is Naomi Roth whose career trajectory has taken her from professor to dean to President of Webster, a New England college with a rising reputation. Politically engaged, Naomi has raised a strong-minded daughter, Hannah, now a sophomore at Webster.

When a student protest arises after a popular professor is 'let go’ following a plagiarism charge Naomi - perhaps nostalgic for her own student days - allows it to go on too long and gain too much momentum and it begins to threaten her relationship with her daughter and her own career.

Well, what I thought would happen in this novel did happen and then something I wasn’t expecting also happened so I was rapidly turning the pages until the end! I loved this description of Naomi lying in the bath trying to read a much-hyped novel by a former graduate:

She climbed into the deep 1920s tub, and the rising heat made it ever more difficult to follow the novel’s story: a missing briefcase full of something. A formula? A code? The paper-thin female character, decribed with a leering male eye, insufferably perky. She hoped that the author did not go around crediting the creative writing teachers he’d studied with a Webster, nof for this. A car chase, cinematically described. The hero’s name was Chance. Of course it was. Jean Hanff Korelitz

I’ve been to Brighton for my daughter’s graduation ceremony and I also managed to catch the Jane Austen By The Sea exhibition at Brighton Pavilion. It was amazing to see drafts of Sanditon in her meticulous handwriting and very poignant to see a lock of her hair which had faded from its original auburn to blonde.  It's a small exhibition but worth seeing and it's on until January 2018. 

You Should Have Known

Grace Sachs is a therapist with a thriving New York practice.  Her husband is a paediatric oncologist and her gifted young son is at private school.  Grace is about to publish her first book You Should Have Known based on her theory that women should be able to detect the signs that a man is a womaniser or a debtor or a misogynist early on in the relationship and act accordingly.

The novel opens with Grace's author photo shoot for Vogue magazine.  She is anxious to distance her book from what she considers to be downmarket self-help guides such as The Rules or Relationships for Dummies.  Indeed, Grace is anxious to distance herself from a lot of things, she has let old friendships go and has a fractious relationship with her father and stepmother.  She considers herself and her husband to be conscientious people who work hard for the good of others and are possessed of unshowy good taste.  Grace's wardrobe consists of parchment coloured cashmere sweaters and linen and wool skirts.

Of course, calling a book which captures the zeitgeist You Should Have Known is asking for trouble.  When the mother of a child at her son's school is murdered and her husband goes missing Grace realises she may have missed the cues in her own relationship.  Jean Hanff Korelitz writes particularly well on relationship therapy and queen bee mothers at the school gates (far better than Gill Hornby's The Hive, I thought).  Whether this novel could be called a thriller I'm not sure, but I liked the gradually unfolding revelations and there is some delicious detail.  I loved the part when Grace discovers that the Hermes Birkin bag her husband bought for her is a fake (the bastard!) 

There is an interesting interview with Jean Hanff Korelitz here.  She is a relative of Helene Hanff, writer of 84 Charing Cross Road.  I would also recommend her previous novel Admission, one of my absolute favourites.

Admission

She knew how to recognise the good girls and the diligent boys, the rebels and fuck-ups, the artsy kids who knew nothing about art and the ones who had art burning inside them.

38-year old Portia Nathan is an admissions officer for Princeton. Her life revolves around recruiting potential students and careful consideration of application folders. At home, at work, in transit she is surrounded by piles of orange folders containing the (sometimes heartbreaking) life stories of the brightest and best 17-year olds.

All is not well with Portia. She has a fractious relationship with her feminist activist mother, a stagnant relationship with her long-term partner and immerses herself in work to blank out events from her own teenage years at Dartmouth.

Fascinating though the admissions process is I was more interested in Portia's relationships. When her partner Mark invites the ghastly Oxbridge academic, Helen, to their dinner party Portia tries not to be irritated by her rudeness, her affected Virginia Woolf hairstyle and her expensive T-strap leather shoes. A lesser writer would have made Helen a caricature, but Jean Hanff Korelitz is much more subtle than that. Similarly, when Portia later learns that Helen is pregnant the truth begins to dawn on her the way all truths emerge:

She was thinking of something, or trying to think of something. Just beyond her grasp, her ken, flittering away.

Admission is amusing, perceptive and clever. You must read it.