SEDUCTION THEORY, by Emily Adrian
Just the idea of distilling Emily Adrian’s cheeky new novel, “Seduction Theory,” into a pithy elevator pitch makes my head hurt. Then again, I’ve always gravitated toward books that resist easy categorization. Among other things, this tour de force is a campus novel, a love story, a coming-of-age narrative, a satire, a performance piece, an M.F.A. exposé, a trove of literary references and a primer on writing.
Though this is Adrian’s sixth book, it brims with the self-assured audacity behind nearly every great debut. This makes a certain amount of sense, as the body of “Seduction Theory” purports to be a graduate thesis written and submitted by Roberta “Robbie” Green, an M.F.A. student at the country’s “sixth-best fully funded” program, at Edwards University in upstate New York.
It is also the means by which Robbie — a plucky Mr. Ripley without the instinct to murder but with a killer facility for language — seeks to expose the bad behavior of Ethan, the husband of the creative writing department’s star scholar, Simone, who is both Robbie’s faculty adviser and, more important, her crush.
Robbie, as our guide, doesn’t present herself until the second chapter. Instead, she uses the first several pages to warp our perspective from a seemingly third-person perspective, buying our confidence as she sets the plot in motion: The department’s “it” couple — believed by everyone, including themselves, to be deliriously happy — are both dangerously close to infidelity.
Ethan, an untenured faculty member “whose pedagogy skewed teddy bear,” is weirdly tempted by the department’s secretary, Abigail, who “could have been beautiful if there had been someone there to let her nap every minute of her life.” Meanwhile, Simone, with “her 54,000 followers, her cheekbones, … her ability to run a sub-six-minute mile and her forthcoming scholarship on nonmonogamy in the 21st century,” appears to be a little too fond of Robbie, or at least more open to Robbie’s obvious interest than she should be.
What follows is an utterly compelling picaresque, which includes a baby raccoon, sex in the department chair’s bathroom, several academic parties and, of course, a road trip: “If there’s one thing I learned in grad school,” Robbie narrates, “it’s that everyone loves a road trip story.”
The book is rife with writing advice, which it endorses and satirizes in equal measure. Says Simone, scantily clad and sipping gin: “In a good story, you only ever need three details to depict a party: something someone said, a smell and a song that played.” This particular Easter egg rewards the observant reader, as Robbie’s initial use of said advice occurs 80 pages earlier, when the department chair says of her dog: “‘Then we discovered he hates females his own age but loves puppies, so we named him Humbert!’ Temperate laughter. Someone’s sandalwood perfume. ‘Lola’ by the Kinks.”
The book’s many self-references, and references to those self-references, are what make the reading experience such fun. Early on Robbie learns Simone has been recording the intimate conversations they’ve been having on their long, intense runs together. You can bet it’s a trick Robbie will put to her own good use later in the narrative. And that’s OK, even expected, because, as she says, “Life was meant to be stolen; plagiarism was a form of love.” (It’s worth noting that Simone wrote a critically acclaimed memoir about her mother’s death, and Ethan wrote a novel about Simone grieving that death. “The books were essentially the same.”)
Robbie’s cruelty is youthful and motivated mostly by her own longing, and because of this it’s slyly seductive: “Ethan sobbed. I had never seen a grown man sob and could have watched him all afternoon.” The reader too in this moment finds pleasure in the man’s tears. His “comfort novel” is “Pnin”! He has sex with his secretary! He shaves his ears before doing so! The only reason he confesses is that Abigail has already sent an email to his wife. As Robbie opines, “Like most apologies, his was self-indulgent.” The problem with this affair, for Ethan, is less about attraction than logistics: “She controlled the photocopier.”
Robbie is ruthless and indiscriminate in the people she’ll skewer, including herself, her whole generation, other generations, poets, memoirists, novelists, trauma writers, breeders, non-breeders and those who, like her, would deign to dabble in, of all things, autofiction. And yet, Robbie’s (and Adrian’s) obvious joy in this overt and performed annoyance comes across less as exhaustion than as a real reverence for the genre’s exhaustive possibilities.
Eventually the narrative leaves behind the conceit that we are living within Robbie’s thesis and we move into a world in which, if Robbie has her way, that thesis will do its intended damage. The result is a finale full of surprises, including one fairy-tale ending, one imagined ending, and one perfectly executed reversal of our expectations.
For its wit and perspicacity, “Seduction Theory” can easily be cataloged in the company of Ann Beattie’s “Walks With Men” or Lorrie Moore’s “Anagrams” — but its intelligent, naïve, misguided narrator also begs comparison to Henry James’s in “The Portrait of a Lady.” Where James has been accused of chewing more than he could bite off, however, Adrian chews, bites and swallows in equal measure, and with obvious gusto.
SEDUCTION THEORY | By Emily Adrian | Little, Brown | 213 pp. | $28
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