It’s been 15 years since Chad Harbach’s first novel, THE ART OF FIELDING, entered the world to rapturous reviews and impressive sales for a work of literary fiction. Given the passage of that much time, Harbach probably had passed from the consciousness of even the most ardent admirers of that work. Certainly, the idea of another hefty novel set at Wisconsin’s tiny fictional Westish College seemed unlikely, but that's what he's produced in THE BRIGHTNESS.

THE ART OF FIELDING focused on a set of male characters --- the members of the Westish Harpooners baseball team --- and its quest to win the Division III national championship. In this work, Harbach turns his attention to a small group of women at the school in 2015, following their personal victories and defeats, loves and losses over the course of an academic year. 

“I never conceived of it as a sequel. I absolutely knew that I wanted to totally flip, invert, re-contextualize the whole world,” Harbach said in a recent New York Times profile. Though it bears many of the hallmarks of his debut --- meticulous character development, fluid prose, and a leisurely pace that evokes classic fiction --- in its particulars, the novel is a substantially different book that views a familiar setting and some of the characters that peopled the first novel through fresh eyes.

"In its overarching sensibility, THE BRIGHTNESS shares a certain literary DNA with the work of Jonathan Franzen, along with that of a writer from an earlier generation, John Updike. Harbach's pace is leisurely, and his prose is marked by arresting moments..."

Harbach triggers the plot quickly, as three female students --- senior Irma Friske; her classmate, Pammy Chang; and their friend, Dahlia Breughel, who's back on campus after an extended absence --- execute a prank to draw attention to a rape at the school two years earlier and the issue of sexual assault on the campus in general. Unsurprisingly, a video documenting their effort --- accompanied by an anonymous manifesto that Irma, an aspiring writer and winner of a prestigious award that included a full scholarship for her college education, produces for the school paper --- goes viral. The fallout quickly spins out of the control of the "Witches of Westish," a name the creators give themselves.

There's a fourth woman whose life intersects with this trio: Pella Affenlicht, the daughter of the college's late president and a recent graduate at age 27 after a failed teenage marriage. She's engaged to Mike Schwartz, the baseball team's former captain. Four years after his graduation, he's working as Westish's assistant athletic director, helping to coach the football and baseball teams as he contemplates applying to law school. They're joined from the cast of THE ART OF FIELDING by Owen Dunne, Mike's former teammate, and a Pulitzer Prize nominee for a debut novel that shares its title with Harbach's first effort, one of several metafictional elements in this story. 

Roughly one-third of the novel intermittently drops in on the weekend of Owen's wedding to Stephen Tilly on Block Island, a celebration Pella helps to plan, while serving as the maid of honor. Those events comprise approximately one-third of the book's length and could have been compressed in their telling without sacrificing much. There's a considerable amount of sexual intrigue threaded through the plot, much of it centering on the multiple liaisons of Nicholas Byrnes, a man who is as faithless as he is irresistible. Harbach alludes to the escapades in A Midsummer Night's Dream and strengthens the Shakespeare connection with several references to The Tempest. 

But at the heart of this story are the complications that arise in the shifting relationships among the foursome of Irma, Dahlia, Pammy and Pella. Irma and Pella find themselves as rivals for the attention of a beloved English professor, Judy Eglantine. Irma, in turn, expends considerable emotional energy trying to penetrate the complex psyche of her friend, Dahlia. All of them, in radically different ways, are searching for their footing in the larger world. But as Judy reminds them, benefiting from a few more decades of life experience, “Sometimes we're so worried about the ending, we forget to enjoy the play.”

For a middle-aged male writer, Harbach has created a nuanced and sympathetic portrait of female friendship through the lives of these characters. In comparison, the male characters are far less interesting and, for the most part, almost one-dimensional. In its overarching sensibility, THE BRIGHTNESS shares a certain literary DNA with the work of Jonathan Franzen, along with that of a writer from an earlier generation, John Updike. Harbach's pace is leisurely, and his prose is marked by arresting moments like this one:

“Over all this fanfare and company, autumn arrived. Arrived as a goddess, not a scourge. Arrived not with wind and rain, not with some premature darkening and foreboding in the sky, not with a shuttering of possibility and a snide presentiment of winter. Arrived, rather, as a mellowing so lovely and deep, it could not have been predicted or longed for before its arrival, improving as it did on what had already seemed ideal. This improvement, this mellowing, this moment, satisfied a longing so deep that the longing itself could scarcely be felt or understood --- it could only be longed for, as in dreams.”

Harbach conceived of THE BRIGHTNESS before the emergence of the #MeToo movement and certainly finished it long before the Cornell University rape scandal burst into the headlines. But there are elements of this story that reflect meaningfully on those events through the lens of fiction. Anyone who fell in love with Westish College and the characters in that small but resonant universe will be delighted to watch them take a long, sometimes circuitous, journey here. One hopes that it's not the end of their story, but if it is, it's been a deeply rewarding one.