THE BRIGHTNESS

Lives come together, and apart, once again in fictional Westish, Wisconsin, and beyond.

In The Art of Fielding (2011), Pella Affenlicht fled to Westish College, where her father was president, to escape a failed marriage and restart her life. Four years later, she’s 27 and a recent graduate. She’s engaged to Mike Schwartz, who was a player on the storied Westish Harpooners baseball team of Harbach’s first book and is now a coach and assistant athletic director at the college. Pella wants Mike to apply to law school, and she’s been helping her friend Owen Dunne—also her late father’s former lover and now a bestselling novelist—prepare for his destination wedding. Her goals for her own future and relationship are less clear. Another close friend is 21-year-old Irma Friske, a “tiny, upright person” and scholarship student. With her friends Pammy Chang and the magnetic, troubled Dahlia Breughel, Irma embarks on a “project” at Westish’s hallowed Parties resulting in two football players tattooed with a shocking phrase on their foreheads, an incident that scandalizes and energizes the Westish campus before capturing national attention. Several explosive dramas at Owen’s wedding, both related and unrelated to this incident, further scramble the characters’ interpersonal relationships, and Pella, in the aftermath, finds herself continuing her journey of self-exploration in New York City. As in his acclaimed debut, Harbach immerses readers in the world of Westish, but he broadens his scope, plunging his characters into new environments and broaching topics such as love and talent and literature, as well as campus sexual assault, feminism, the fraught politics of victimhood, and the volatile media landscape that complicates all of these. Apt evocations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest abound. While this novel can certainly be enjoyed independent of its predecessor, those who’ve read the first book will more fully appreciate the continued growth and dilemmas of Pella, Mike, and Owen (the Skrimmer makes appearances, too), to say nothing of the clever metafictional twist Harbach pulls off via Owen’s novel, which is titled—well, take a guess.

Brilliant, poignant, and absorbing.