Chad Harbach — co-founder of n+1, author of the 2011 phenomenon The Art of Fielding — is back with a new novel, The Brightness, out in October from Little, Brown. n+1’s fall issue (“Power Play”) runs an excerpt set at Westish College, the fictional Lake Michigan campus of his debut. It opens the college’s legendary season-kickoff blowout: the Parties.
- The opening view is an omniscient narrator with a knowing wink: “such as existed in the 19th century, or one of those camera-equipped drones that exist in the 21st, which certain male students love to fly”
- Kegs trucked in, a two-story bouncy castle inflated, holiday lights strung in the maples — and bedsheet banners across the manors reading “we are one”
- Irma, who has “on principle, never been to the Parties,” gets swept up by her glamorous, chronically late friend Dahlia — tasseled prismatic dress, fire-engine-red lipstick, “the word siren leaped to Irma’s mind”
- The teaser line under the title: “You picked the wrong guy. I don’t hate women” — a hint of the power dynamics the novel is circling
The excerpt is a small study in belonging and its rituals: a mass party’s manufactured “we are one” against one woman’s principled refusal to join. The remainder is paywalled, but the opening page does a lot — logistics, friendship, and the gravitational pull of a campus institution, all in a few hundred words.