SLONIM WOODS 9

This unsettling memoir depicts college friends in thrall to one student’s devious, domineering father.

Levin vividly evokes the collegiate atmosphere of the early 2010s, focusing on the bizarre experiences he endured at Sarah Lawrence College. “When I lived there I was a member of what I can now call a cult,” he writes. While living in group housing, several students’ lives were hijacked by Larry Ray, one girl’s father. Initially introduced as “an incredible human being” with national security credentials, he served time in prison due to a vengeful ex-wife’s machinations and involvement in scandals surrounding one-time Rudy Giuliani associate Bernard Kerik. Without much scrutiny, Ray moved in with the students and insinuated himself into their lives. A manipulative charmer, he soon commanded instant obedience. He moved the group to an apartment in Manhattan, increasingly controlling their sexual identities and inner lives, as he noted: “My skill set has been breaking minds, creating loops it’s impossible to get out of….But I also have the ability to unravel the knots people have made in themselves.” The narrative bubbles with tension as readers wonder how Ray will further extend his control over the group members, who were still “pretending we had something private, though nothing, really, was private anymore.” Even when Levin studied in England, he remained preoccupied with Ray. “Something in me,” he writes, “clamored for that feeling: time vanishing, that warmth washing over me, being able to share my secret fears, being told—convinced, rather—that every­thing would be all right.” Levin controls this unsavory tale by contrasting Ray’s bombast and deceptions with his own struggles with depression and identity alongside intense depictions of settings ranging from the bucolic campus to the group’s flashy Manhattan environs. He captures how intense adolescent friendships are vulnerable to manipulation. Sometimes the author’s exactitude becomes tiresome, as he relies on re-created conversations, including Ray’s menacing monologues. (Ray has since been indicted on federal charges pertaining to the events documented here and elsewhere).

An unusual, affecting portrait of how post-adolescent power dynamics are susceptible to cultish abuse.