LEVINSON OF HARVARD

Vincent offers a novel of intergenerational drama at Harvard University.

As the story opens in 2008, Philadelphia-based Mark Levinson is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, attending his 35th class reunion at Harvard. At the festivities, he meets Becca Wyatt, with whom he'd once had a brief but passionate fling. Their own personal reunion is an uncomfortable one, and she leaves him with a mysterious package that dovetails with his own project to chronicle his family history: Despite family lore, it turns out there’s no record of Mark's grandfather Michael Levinson ever having attended Harvard in the early years of the 20th century. Thus unfolds the fascinating story of a bygone era at the university and a young man named Chauncey Bates Porter who wants more than anything to be a big man on campus and be accepted into exclusive groups—such as the Institute of 1770, which transformed into the famed Hasty Pudding Club in 1927. But as Mark’s research progresses, involving awkward interviews with elderly relatives who thought the past was dead and buried, he becomes increasingly aware of the fact that his grandfather, along with Porter, was hiding a whopper of a secret that might upend Mark’s own life nearly a century hence. Over the course of this novel, Vincent expertly balances the inquiries of his narrative’s present-day story with the urgencies of the Harvard of Michael’s time. The result is a stylish and surprisingly gripping family drama. “There always has to be an endpoint to historical research, and it always feels like the endpoint is arbitrary, because in fact, it usually is,” Mark is told at one point. “You can never learn the complete story.” Set against this intriguingly indeterminate backdrop, Vincent brings the old Harvard vividly alive, turning the story on the engaging machinations of a desperate, proud young man who says simply, “I did not want to be invisible. I did not want to be an outsider.”

A compulsively readable university tale of identity and acceptance.