SEDUCTION THEORY

A pretentious academic couple engenders the wrath of a jealous grad student at an elite college in upstate New York.

This terrifically inventive matryoshka doll of a novel opens with a title page indicating we are reading the thesis project of Roberta Green, MFA candidate. Yet the narrative blending that follows is so layered that even by the end it begs an unraveling of which fiction is which. The outline is simple: Simone is an anomaly—a glamorous academic—and happily married to Ethan, a fellow English professor. Though Ethan worships his wife, he has a fling with the rumpled Abigail, the department’s secretary. Meanwhile, Simone is having an emotional entanglement with grad student Roberta. As her advisor, Simone should be guiding Roberta on this MFA project we are reading, but instead they are training for a marathon and wandering around Simone and Ethan’s house in states of sweaty undress. When Simone discovers Ethan’s affair, the couple embarks on an impromptu cross-country journey. The work has two remarkably distinct registers: It’s a tender portrait of an enviable marriage balanced by a delightfully smarmy tone with laugh-out-loud passages of humor. As Roberta dates a girl on campus while fantasizing about Simone and the revenge she will be taking in the form of this novel, Ethan and Simone are left wondering what their marriage means. But what is the truth? A novel that makes authorial control so visible—Roberta’s comically biased character portraits; the midpage shifting between third- and first-person narration; the conclusion rewritten to first reflect Roberta’s fantasy and then the "reality"—could have left the whole enterprise as simply a jewel to be admired. Happily, it is all much more than a Borgesian experiment: It is a finely observed work on love.

A masterful exploration on the varieties of truth, and the stories we craft about ourselves.