B. D. McClay reviews Chad Harbach’s The Brightness, a return to the college world of The Art of Fielding. She admires its portraits of friendship and unfinished adulthood. Her objection is that its people often escape the social pressures that should shape their lives.
- Set in 2015, the novel follows friends Pella and Irma through a wedding, a campus protest, and their aftermath.
- A feminist prank becomes a national media spectacle. Brands gain attention while students bear the consequences, with little accomplished for sexual-assault prevention.
- Harbach makes his earlier novel a book written by one of the characters. McClay argues that exposing classmates and a college president would provoke more anger than this fictional world allows.
- Thinly disguised women’s websites and media personalities supply period references without fully establishing what power they hold over the characters.
- Irma is the review’s strongest counterexample: her conflicting loyalties, desires, and moral commitments make her feel alive without promising a neatly resolved identity.
McClay’s defense of realism depends on its attention to society. A novel about campus life needs the friendships, silences, and compromises through which people accommodate harm. Psychological insight loses force when those surrounding pressures disappear.
The review also resists making fiction justify itself as news. A prose style, an interest in people, and a sense of their shared world can carry a novel. Its characters can remain unfinished without their world remaining indistinct.