The Campus Novel to End All Campus Novels

Lords of Serendipity
by randy boyagoda
mariner books, 352 pages, $30

Can the campus novel still exist, as a genre, if universities are in decline? That is the question raised by Randy Boyagoda’s latest novel, Lords of Serendipity, a hilarious but unforgiving satire of the “laurel-wreathed debt trap” that universities have become. 

Its plot has two strands that are skillfully woven together at the novel’s conclusion. One follows a young Sri Lankan girl, Devi, and her all-consuming ambition to attend “OxfordCambridgeHarvardPrincetonYaleStanford”—or “Ochpys,” as she often calls it—an ambition fueled by her father, who unclogs hotel toilets to pay for her WhatsApp tutorials with Johannes, an “Oxbridge” student who does not seem to be quite what he claims. The other strand is defined by two American colleges: At the run-down Arcadia Tech, Jack, an unassuming statistics professor and widower, teaches an enormous course load to pay his daughter Katrina’s fees at Haven College, the idyllic New England liberal arts school where he met his late wife. 

The minor characters give further weight to the satirical punch of the novel. Many of them brought to my mind the “characters” in Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, the perfect embodiments of contemporary mores and vices. The tech-bro PhD student Allard makes a very tidy profit each year selling grades at Arcadia, especially to international students, while threatening them with deportation if they betray him. His mother, Patricia, sincerely loves the liberal arts and is rewarded with a failed academic career and a marginal post teaching research methods, where she eventually gets replaced by an AI chatbot. A friend of Jack’s, Helen, avoids the budget cuts that are decimating the university by moving into an administrative position. She admits to Jack that the university overlooks the widespread practice of cheating and the real reason why international students come to Arcadia: to secure a green card and bring over their families. Jack later accepts a job at a university in Sri Lanka, where he works with Martin, an internationally lauded physicist whose research he discovers is fraudulent. The university is renamed Serendipity University to please its Chinese benefactors, who have political plans in the region. Katrina’s performatively woke boyfriend, Mather, sleeps with her and, after momentarily fearing she will accuse him of rape, falls back “breathing out future careers of relief” when he realizes he is safe. 

This is far from the cozy campus novels of the twentieth century, such as David Lodge’s trilogy, Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night, Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street, or even Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, the inspiration behind much of the “Dark Academia” trend online. The postwar boom of universities and liberal arts colleges provided a setting that now seems quaint, nostalgic, comforting. But that idyll is deceptive. Boyagoda tears down the fantasy behind so much campus fiction, which sets up false expectations of what happens on campuses today.

The novel’s most poignant moments are its depictions of the toll paid by students and their parents who make the university the object of such hope that they cannot but be disappointed. Jack’s overriding desire is to get Katrina “into Haven” and to pay her fees to keep her in Haven until she graduates—not altogether subtle, but a fair way of depicting how education has become the supreme good for many parents, the coveted means of securing their children’s happiness, regardless of whether they really understand what that education will bring. 

Readers of Boyagoda’s previous novels will recognize the usual taut storytelling, the spare prose style, the absurdist humor. The ambition behind this novel, which took him ten years to write, compared with the shorter, more comedic forays made in his previous works, might make one think that this is Boyagoda’s magnum opus, his Brideshead Revisited. And that would be true. But in some ways, the tone is more reminiscent of Waugh’s early satires before his conversion. The Catholic themes of Original Prin and Dante’s Indiana are no longer here. The protagonist of those novels, a Catholic English professor of Sri Lankan descent, who seemed to be Boyagoda in a nightmarish version of his real life, is replaced by the dispassionate, impersonal perspective of the satirical narrator in Lords of Serendipity. The characters are mired in slippery moral ambiguities with no final resolution or escape. 

What all of the characters experience, in one form or another, is betrayal by “the corruption upon corruption upon corruption of the university.” The closing pages of the book cast a tragic light on what came before, without any hope of an easy resolution or redemption. This is not to say that Lords of Serendipity is bitter. It has enough humor to save it from that, but the novel will still feel like a well-aimed punch in the gut to all who lament the state of higher ed. 

Boyagoda has written the campus novel to end all campus novels, at least until we admit that the campus of past campus novels no longer exists. In one biting passage, Patricia is walking through Haven and observes the “chapels turned into wellness centers; library stacks being eliminated to make space for meditation zones, test kitchens, flex spaces.” She wonders what will happen to “the historic buildings that made up the front quadrangle—the chapel, the library, the main academic hall, and the dining hall. This was a collegiate Gothic quartet in blackened gray stone and greened copper, with gargoyles and turrets peeking and popping out everywhere. . . . What glorious uselessness, what hope, what confidence in the goings-on that would happen inside, when these were built a century ago! Going, going, gone.” 

Image by Robert Esdaile via Creative Commons. Image cropped.