PROFESSOR GREGG

A college professor falls in love with one of his students in Smith’s historical novel.

In the 1970s, Harrison Gregg teaches rhetorical theory at the University of Virginia and becomes a popular teacher among the student body. He strikes up a friendship with a promising freshman named Thomas; over time they grow closer and finally become best friends. When Thomas betrays Gregg and sleeps with his girlfriend, Diana, Gregg realizes he’s so stung because he’s actually fallen in love with Thomas. Later, after Gregg leaves Virginia after being denied tenure, he continues to pine for Thomas, though Thomas gives him little encouragement. Here, Gregg contemplates his disappointment in the earnest, melodramatic terms that typify Smith’s soap-operatic novel: “Maybe he only wants written communication. Maybe I scared him terribly that last night. Or maybe I had said all I needed to say to him. But that can’t be; human relationships must be inexhaustible, mustn’t they.” Thomas eventually marries Diana, though it is a fraught union, and Gregg becomes a political operative in Washington, D.C. The highlight of the book is its depiction of university life in the 1970s, full of excitement and radicalism but also hypocrisy, a professional cosmos with which Gregg finally grows disenchanted (“Each meeting of a faculty committee convinced him that these people were more and more concerned with their own survival and less and less concerned with improving their students”). However, the author’s prose vacillates between treacly sentimentality and arid intellectualizing; the unfortunate result is that the narrative never grips the reader either emotionally or intellectually, a predicament exacerbated by the plot’s desultory meandering. One can’t help but feel that Smith is presenting the reader with some kind of moral lesson—the story has a tincture of didacticism—but it’s never clear what that lesson is.

An evocative ’70s campus yarn that ultimately fails to satisfy as drama or philosophical commentary.