FAMOUS MEN

A personal and professional entanglement with an acclaimed writer shapes a young woman’s life.

When Wilhelmina Miles first discovers Nathaniel Fellow, through his poetry, she feels drawn to him. They’re both from Greening, Michigan, which the now-lauded Nathaniel long ago escaped but where teenage Will still lives; her mother works in the cafeteria at Rosendale Academy, the private school Nathaniel attended. In 2010, Will, a budding writer herself, gains acceptance to a college in New York City that’s “mediocre” but, crucially, is located “one crosstown bus away from the famous university where Nathaniel Fellow taught in a small but prestigious MFA program.” When she meets 62-year-old Nathaniel, he is rude and cruel, but he offers her a position as his literary assistant, a job that soon outgrows its already nebulous bounds into a far more personal and, yes, sexual relationship. Nathaniel’s students become Will’s rivals and friends, but he is her life’s center. Will and Nathaniel’s arrangement endures, in shifting permutations, for many years, recounted by the future, wiser Will, with whom the novel eventually catches up. Men’s misdeeds stalk the book—before Nathaniel, Will had already endured sexual assault and humiliation at the hands of her high school peers and unwanted attention from her mother’s creepy boyfriend—but she fervently dispels any claim to victimhood: “Hadn’t I left the curtains open, day after day after day…?” This insistence on denial proves extremely difficult for Will when retribution inevitably comes for Nathaniel. Buntin’s premise may be familiar, but the novel pays masterful attention to complexity, presenting events and relationships in all their strangeness and contradictions. Her language is superb; for all Will’s self-assuredness, the precarity of her situation, tied so inextricably to Nathaniel, is rendered in such exacting and heartrending detail as to make the reader’s teeth ache. The structure of the novel allows for heightened poignancy as Will reflects on the consequences of the choices she made over the years, as well as the ones she didn’t.

A searing, brilliant novel about power, and stories, and who gets to tell them.