THE NIMBUS, by Robert P. Baird
“He was on fire. Adrian’s son was on fire.”
These are the opening sentences of Robert P. Baird’s debut novel, “The Nimbus.” Without purpose or cause, a halo flares around Prof. Adrian Bennett’s 2-year-old son, Luca, while he naps in his stroller. To add to the intrigue, that stroller is parked in Bennett’s office in what the novel simply calls the Div School, an institution with architecture that smacks of Old World venerability — spires and limestone portals and such — though the school hasn’t hit the century mark.
Baird’s choice of setting, Hogwarts meets the University of Chicago (where the author attended divinity school), certainly adds to the novel’s mood. It’s giving, as the kids say, medieval metaphysical mystery.
Or, rather, that appears to be the case in the early pages. Mystery isn’t exactly what Baird is after; he’s interested in cloistered academic life and what happens when the inexplicable occurs within its confines. Turns out that Luca’s light is a real wrecking ball, not because of any inherent powers or properties — in effect it has none — but because of what its appearance catalyzes in others.
This is a worthwhile set of concerns. Having spent a fair amount of time in hallowed halls like those in the novel, I confess a particularly keen curiosity about how Baird might plumb these depths.
Adrian, a gifted if relatively insufferable scholar of religion, lives in tastefully disheveled affluence with his wife, Renata, a former fiction writer turned owner of some sort of nonprofit consultancy (Baird is snarkily nonspecific about the nature of her services), and their two sons, Max and Luca. Adrian is tenured and comfortable, even as he hams it up as an intellectual malcontent for anyone who will buy it.
Among the beguiled is Paul Harkin, Adrian’s research assistant and graduate school advisee, a kindly, not particularly ambitious Ph.D. candidate, who “sometimes wondered if being a graduate student was not, in fact, his true calling in life.” The wider cast of characters includes Warren, a disaffected, socially isolated Div School graduate whose academic prospects were dashed many years before; various meanspirited old-guard professors; Mariela, the Bennetts’ nanny; and a loan shark called The Weight.
As satire, “The Nimbus” is uneven. On one hand, Baird wonderfully roasts Adrian’s pretensions: “For a time, Adrian tried to get everyone to call his son’s glow a khvarenah,” a word from Zoroastrian scripture used to describe a “divine radiance” given to ancient Persian kings. Other characters’ scholarly esoterica are also fair game: As he gazes at the carved oak angels in the Div School library — Old Library, as it is called — Warren ponders the 18th-century thinker Soame Jenyns’s writing on human suffering. Oh, brother.
The novel takes aim at the spiritually and intellectually hollow lives of its subjects, and by extension, the erudite upper classes more generally. An extraordinary event like a haloed child is buried under a steaming pile of rationalization, opportunism and banality (having a glowing toddler is incredibly tedious — so many doctor’s appointments!).
Baird admirably creates tension between the weighty metaphysical questions to which his characters have devoted their professional lives and the way they actually confront the mystical, which is with about as little metaphysical sensibility as you could imagine. So much for the sublime.
But as the scholarly arcana pile up, their function becomes muddied and ambiguous. “The Nimbus” is so intent on skewering its infinitely skewerable protagonists that they feel more like ciphers than fully developed characters. The satire loses complexity along with them.
This is exacerbated by dialogue that is sometimes hellbent on getting the message across. Quips Paul’s Southern friend Billy (accent implied), “Academia ain’t right for people who ain’t got something wrong with them in the head.”
An action-movie subplot attempts to pick up the slack, but with too many disparate, and occasionally implausible, elements. Warren owes a serious chunk of cash to The Weight, who’s been threatening him; he’ll forgive the debt if Warren uses his connection to Adrian to get him an audience with Luca. (In a series of twists too involved to detail here, the loan shark caught a glimpse of the glowing white child when Mariela, the nanny, took him to her church, where the all-Latino congregation gathered worshipfully around to chant and pray.)
I suspect this scene was a well-intentioned effort to inject a more explicitly numinous reaction to Luca, but it’s pretty cringe-worthy. As the happenings rush on, a Texas billionaire enters the picture with the intention to endow a center at the Div School, in his own name, of course. Adrian, rather conveniently, grows ever more duplicitous and wildly behaved. Violence ensues.
A lucky few books are gifted with a premise so intriguing as to be irresistible. Such was the case with “The Nimbus.” I was rooting for it, but in the end, like the halo at the center of the book, there’s an awful lot of light, without a great deal of revelation.
THE NIMBUS | By Robert P. Baird | Holt | 352 pp. | $29.99
The post A Toddler With a Halo Stirs Up the Campus Unfaithful appeared first on New York Times.
