I am posting a picture from Christchurch Priory, Dorset, a medieval structure which actually would be a good place for a murder mystery. I’m not going to post a picture of the book cover, because the cover is beautiful and it will suck you in to buying it and you will end up throwing it across the room and denting it anyway.
At least if you’re an academic.
The setting is the Cloisters section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the narrator/protagonist is Ann, a townie from Walla Walla, Washington, who has managed to scrape a degree in art history rather than something more practical. So far so good. I’m absolutely in favour of people studying what they care about and what they’re interested in! This should be widely accessible and supported!
Ann gets an internship at the Cloisters, and is seduced by its stone walls and archives, as well as the pace and glamorous brutality of New York City–or do the bright lights of the fast-paced city merely reveal the darkness she already holds within? The Cloisters is, inevitably, dark academia–there are secrets, and tensions, and power struggles, and a slipstream out of the quotidian into the world of tarot and Renaissance ideas of fate and luck.
The thing is, of course, that the dark underbelly of academia is not conspiracies to keep arcane research secret, or the propensity of the glamorous patrician to murder people who get in their way, or even cut-throat competition for funding and fellowships. What troubles academia (in the UK and I believe in the US as well) is a climate of anti-intellectualism, and a constant vortex of pettifogging bureaucracy, a prioritising of shiny buildings over quality teaching and curiosity-driven research, a time of contempt towards the arts and humanities resulting in job cuts and a steering of students towards STEM or business or out of higher education altogether (nobody would invest in the obscure strand of research that Ann pursues, let alone commit murder for it, which rather downgrades the career-making/breaking stakes here), and the chokehold of a corporate vision that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
So in the current climate, the fact that a character submits an article to a journal in August and has it published in December (of the same year) and immediately gets a choice of Ivy League PhD studentships to study art history of all things is…bemusing.
And after a week of more meetings and spreadsheets than actual time to read anything, let alone write, howlers like the following:
“Alone, after all, was my default way of being, one of the main reasons that academia had appealed to me in the first place: the ability to be unchaperoned with captivating objects and ancient histories. This, I preferred to the idea of working in an office with small talk and endless meetings, the forced intimacy of team-building exercises. Academia did away with all that. And for that, I was grateful.”
are, for me, enraging and exhausting.
But not as enraging as the following:
“[[main character] had a history of being difficult. Apparently, her freshman year she accused a male graduate student of artificially lowering her grade because she wouldn’t sleep with him. There was no material proof, just her word against his. The student ended up having to leave [the university]” (p. 270).
Regardless of the hackneyed use of this trope to indicate potential villainy, would we say difficult here? would we? in this post #metoo moment? in a world where this is very very rarely the consequence even in cases where there is “material proof” (whatever that means here)
But it’s just a novel! It’s not supposed to be realistic! It’s escapism!
Indeed. I happily read things about murdery cheerleaders or storm-bringing witches. I think The Secret History (1992) is both a hoot and genuinely troubling. I just profoundly enjoyed revisiting Dune (1965) (which despite its problems, and indeed perhaps because of them, could be read as a far more accurate metaphor for academia than The Cloisters). But The Cloisters isn’t just wildly fantastical in its imaginings of university and its denizens (“It was my first glimpse inside an academic home: there were framed manuscript pages and an encaustic triptych on display, a table covered with oddly-shaped white dice, shelves filled with leather-bound books”), but the actual fantasy doesn’t work.
What I’m trying to say is that I’ll appreciate pretty much anything if the vibes are there–and here the vibes are not. There’s no urgency, there’s no ambivalence, there’s no irony or dark humour, there’s no seduction. There’s no sense of urgency or precision–the characters just lurch towards their destinies as if they’ve never seen Gone Girl or even Gossip Girl--and this is partly because of the weird chronological structure. We don’t see any of the crises of the novel happening in real time, so by the time Ann finds something out or reveals her own secrets, the time when it would actually have mattered is long past. The characters creak: the wicked are pedestrian, and the good even more so. The plot is highly predictable (ironically in a book that features tarot as a leitmotif).
Honestly, it needs more sex and violence, and more sense of place, and indeed dread, in order to work as the thing it’s trying to be. And as for Ann, half the time I forgot who she was to the extent that when someone used her name it took a minute to figure out who they were talking about.
