FOR YOU I WOULD MAKE AN EXCEPTION

In Belletto’s novel, a cynical college professor discovers the long-lost daughter he never knew he had.

Will Sorley is a bit of a snob. A cosmopolitan fifth-generation Californian with a healthy appreciation of his own intellect, he finds himself teaching literature at a small college in rust-belt Pennsylvania, where the local wines are terrible and the dating scene leaves much to be desired. He may have finally found an acceptable partner in Angie—a photographer who has just stayed over for her third night in a row—but the budding romance is endangered by an out-of-the-blue email from someone named Petra. She’s a teenager living in Kenya, and she claims to be Will’s biological child. “If you are him (he?) I am hereby informing you that you have a daughter,” she writes. “Would it be possible for you to reply at your earliest convenience because I could greatly benefit from fatherly assistance. Thank you.” Her mother, Audra, is a woman Will had a brief but intense affair with back in San Francisco and who has since gone AWOL, leaving Petra more or less a prisoner at her Kenyan boarding school. Is Will willing to come to Kenya to help her escape? Doing so might threaten his relationship with Angie, but it gets him out of Pennsylvania—and takes him on a surreal tour of his own past, through California, Africa, and India, discovering a richer, more complicated version of his life than he ever could have imagined. Will’s slacker curmudgeon demeanor should be familiar to fans of 1990s campus novels. He’s not terribly sympathetic, an idea that the author plays with occasionally: “ ‘Will!’ my sister would say. ‘Don’t be a lovable [expletive]-up’—by which she meant I shouldn’t embody too fully a certain strain of male privilege book reviewers had been pointing out recently.” The plot goes to some unexpected places, and though they perhaps don’t amount to much in terms of intellectual heft (Will himself would be disappointed), Belletto knows how to hold the reader’s attention.

A lively novel about the obligations that give a life meaning.