Occasionally, you will encounter a book that seems custom-made for you. Emily Adrian\u2019s \u201cSeduction Theory\u201d is that kind of book.<\/p>\n
Set in a milieu with which you are familiar (small graduate creative writing program)? Check.<\/p>\n
Has fundamentally decent but flawed characters trying to figure out how to live despite those flaws? Check.<\/p>\n
A plot that unfolds with clear, character-motivated logic that also manages to surprise and keep you wondering how things might end? Check.<\/p>\n
Funny? Check. Check. Check.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t have a lot of critical defenses against this kind of book, so I can\u2019t guarantee that my experience will be every reader\u2019s experience. But perhaps if I describe my experience accurately enough, you will know if this is a book for you.<\/p>\n
\u201cSeduction Theory\u201d is primarily the story of Simone and Ethan, a married couple and members of the Edwards University creative writing department. Simone is an academic superstar: an acclaimed scholar, author of a bestselling memoir about grief and a magnetic classroom presence. She is also glamorously beautiful. Ethan is the author of a critically acclaimed, prize-nominated novel but doesn\u2019t have much to show for his efforts in recent years.\u00a0 He is tall and handsome. They appear devoted to each other.<\/p>\n
While the story is primarily Simone and Ethan\u2019s, we learn at the outset that the person telling the story is Roberta Green, and we are actually reading her MFA thesis that will be submitted to the creative writing department at Edwards University.<\/p>\n
The novel\/thesis opens in standard third person as we are introduced to a scene at the end-of-year creative writing department party. Our narrator unfurls an encounter of Ethan possibly flirting with Abigail, the single-mom department secretary who is nowhere close to Simone\u2019s league in terms of glamour or accomplishment, but to whom Ethan appears to be drawn.<\/p>\n
Just as we\u2019re settling in, Roberta shows up as a first-person \u201cI,\u201d because of course she is also at the party. Roberta is a student of both Simone and Ethan\u2019s, and she is convinced \u2014 with some reason \u2014 that perhaps she is on the verge of consummating an affair with Simone. They have grown close as mentor and mentee, and Simone has decided not to join Ethan on a yearly pilgrimage back to Portland to see his mother. But guess who will be in Portland at the same time as Ethan? Abigail.<\/p>\n
Complications, that shall remain vague for the sake of the reader\u2019s pleasure, ensue.<\/p>\n
As a narrator, Roberta is part spy, part participant, part psychologist, part fabulist, both partly reliable, partly unreliable.<\/p>\n
In lesser hands, the story of husband and wife getting a mid-marriage itch for adventure could be banal, but Adrian (via Roberta) probes the hearts and minds of her characters in a way that reveals the combination of desire and stupidity that rests in all of our hearts, and that has the potential to lead us to both our greatest triumphs and worst defeats.<\/p>\n
The fact that it is Roberta mediating what we\u2019re privy to adds a pleasing layer of metafictional complication but does so in a way that also gives us access to Roberta\u2019s interior as we see her authorial choices in telling the story, sometimes even doubling back to re-tell a previous episode. As the novel turns toward its conclusion, we see that Simone and Ethan are going to have to reckon with their story, as told by another.<\/p>\n
I felt for all these people by the end, while also finding great comedy in their many foibles.<\/p>\n
I also read \u201cSeduction Theory\u201d in a single sitting, perhaps proving the accuracy of its title.<\/p>\n