The Devil and Webster

The Devil and Webster by Jean Hanff Korelitz

FOR me, nothing says October like a good campus novel. Regardless of what season they're actually set in, they elicit that back-to-school feeling — crisp leaves in the quad, dreary faculty meetings, library carrels filled with low autumnal light, beer pong at frat parties. Think Donna Tartt's The Secret History, Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys or Richard Russo's Straight Man for lauded literary iterations.

Jean Hanff Korelitz knows academia (her 2009 novel, Admission, about a Princeton admissions officer, was made into the Tina Fey movie of the same name) and it shows in her sixth book, The Devil and Webster.

The Webster of the title is a fictional liberal arts college in Massachusetts (think Dartmouth or Wesleyan) where Naomi Roth, a dyed-in-the-wool leftie, is the first female president.

Her first term in office is not going smoothly, owing to a student protest over the fact that a Black professor was denied tenure; Naomi's daughter is among the protesters, as is a Palestinian student with a painful history. Because tenure proceedings are confidential, they are not privy to the reasons the prof was not approved.

It's not easy to write a satire about identity politics on campus, but Hanff Korelitz threads the needle, with a keen eye for hypocrisy but a sympathetic ear for the young students who "need to feel their specialness. And one way they feel it is to transmute any kind of discomfort into outright oppression."

— Jill Wilson