“Why Stanford?” Naomi asked. She was happy under the weight of her daughter’s arm. She never wanted to move.
“I don’t know,” Hannah said. “I wanted something really different. Different part of the world. Different frame of reference. Maybe I wanted to be atypical in my setting.” She smiled. “I’m kind of generic here, you know.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” said Naomi. It came out sounding a tiny bit defensive. “Generic Webster is a great kid.”
“Yeah. But if it’s all you know, how can you tell if that’s who you are because it’s really who you are, or because you never actually gave it serious thought? And besides: California! California’s gorgeous!”
“And three thousand miles away!” Naomi said. She was no longer even trying to censor her tone. It was really hitting her now.
“Yeah. But it’s time for me to leave.” Hannah smiled at her, though sadly. “You know that.”
“Wasn’t it time for you to leave two years ago? That’s the way most people do it. You could have applied to Stanford then. You could have applied anywhere.”
Hannah shook her head. Her truncated hair looked nearly gold in this last light. “I should have, I guess. But…you know, I didn’t think you were ready.”
Naomi stared at her. Then, somewhat to her own surprise, she started to laugh.
“It’s funny?” her daughter asked.
“It’s hilarious. I have raised the most empathic child on the planet. Obviously! Everybody else is tearing out the door. They can’t get away fast enough. But not Hannah. Hannah stays behind to keep an eye on Mom.”
“Well, someone has to.” She smiled. “You can’t be left alone. Who knows what you’d do? Speaking of which, I hear you’ve got a boyfriend.”
“Who told you that?” Naomi asked.
“My friend Millie. She was on your panel at the Native American thing? She said there was a definite something between you and the keynote speaker. I was skeptical, obviously.”
“Obviously?” Naomi said. “Thanks a lot.”
“She also said he had a certain…appeal. For an older guy. So it’s true?”
Naomi shrugged. “Could be. We’ve met up a few times. We went to Sturbridge Village a couple of weeks ago.”
Hannah looked mystified. “Sturbridge Village? Like where you go on elementary school field trips? That’s a date?”
“Well, date. We’re too old to go on dates. But he’s a history professor. It’s hard for historians to resist a ‘living history’ installation. Half the time they’re getting excited about some obscure tool or bit of ephemera, the other half they’re railing about things the museum got wrong.”
“Well, it sounds just fab,” Hannah said with glorious sarcasm. “I’ll leave you to it.”
“Come on. He’s an interesting man. He’s kind. I like him. I think you’d like him.”
Hannah was giving her a maddening smile, tight-lipped, as absurdly proud as any mom watching her kid perform some deeply ordinary feat for the very first time. Then she leaned her head against Naomi’s shoulder, and Naomi, full of this sweet and melancholy thing, closed her eyes. She was concentrating on the last warmth of the sun before it fled, and the sound that was now coming across the Billings lawn. The boy on the Stump was playing an accordion. Hannah, beside her, was listening, too. “I know that song,” Naomi said.
But she didn’t. She couldn’t name it. Something about the waves? Something about a hot air balloon? “‘On a Flight Above the Ocean’?” she suggested.
Hannah laughed, clear and light. “‘In the Aeroplane over the Sea.’”
Naomi nodded. Yes, that. Her daughter moved closer.
“It’s pretty, though,” Hannah said, after a minute. Her eyes, apparently, were not closed. “Whatever else you can say about Webster, it’s pretty here. I got to grow up in a beautiful place.”
Naomi nodded. What else could you say about Webster? Just now, she couldn’t say anything, but the next time she did there would probably be tears. That thing you dread, after all, when it comes, if it comes, it doesn’t matter how unsurprising it turns out to be; it is still that thing you dread, and it has still happened. She’d had a little reprieve, Naomi saw, but now it was here. The thing. This thing: Hannah was leaving. Hannah had grown up and she was leaving, and Naomi had no sympathy for herself, because the whole fact of it was so very ordinary. But it was everything, too.
Acknowledgments
In the spring of 1999, my second child arrived hot on the heels of my second novel, The Sabbathday River, which related some extraordinary events in the life of a woman named Naomi Roth. The little boy grew up, and I wrote other books about other characters. I thought I was finished with Naomi Roth. I wasn’t finished. A few months after The Devil and Webster is published, my son will leave for college. I really do think I am finished with Naomi Roth now. I will miss both of them, though perhaps one more than the other. So goes the ordinary life of a novelist, a mother, or, in my case, both, but of course I also know how extraordinarily fortunate I’ve been.
I am grateful to Ragdale for a fellowship that enabled me to make significant headway on this novel. I thank two college presidents, Debora Spar of Barnard College and David E. Van Zandt of the New School for Social Research, who fearlessly allowed me to peek beneath the veil of their demanding jobs.
A certain tale about plagiarism was itself plagiarized, or at any rate borrowed, from the late Frank Kinahan, who told it to me a quarter century ago. It was just too good not to.
I am ever thankful for my wonderful agent, Suzanne Gluck, and my loyal, brilliant editor, Deb Futter, and everyone who works with them; I can’t convey how lucky I feel to be in their care. Thanks to my parents, sister, husband, daughter, and son, and to my friends Lisa Eckstrom, Leslie Kuenne, Elise Paschen, Elisa Rosen, Sally Singer, Peggy O’Brien, and most especially Deborah Michel and Laurie Eustis.
And to Jack, who left us during the writing of this novel. Beloved accordion boy, good-bye.
About the Author
Jean Hanff Korelitz was born and raised in New York and graduated from Dartmouth College and Cambridge University. She is the author of five previous novels, You Should Have Known, Admission (adapted for the 2013 film of the same name, starring Tina Fey, Paul Rudd, and Lily Tomlin), The White Rose, The Sabbathday River, and A Jury of Her Peers, as well as a novel for children, Interference Powder, and a collection of poems, The Properties of Breath. She lives in New York City with her husband, the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, with whom she recently adapted James Joyce’s “The Dead” as an immersive theater event: The Dead, 1904.
If you would like to invite Jean Hanff Korelitz to your book group please visit www.bookthewriter.com.
Also by Jean Hanff Korelitz
Novels
You Should Have Known
Admission
The White Rose
The Sabbathday River
A Jury of Her Peers
For Children
Interference Powder
Poetry
The Properties of Breath
Reading Group Guide
Discussion Questions
Naomi Roth, the first female president of Webster College, was promoted to her role in part because of her handling of an on-campus crisis surrounding a transgender student. What was it about her leadership during that scandal that appealed to the trustees, do you think? Were the qualities that got her the role the same ones she would ultimately need as president? Why or why not?
What parallels do you see between the Radclyffe Hall problem and the protest at the Stump? If you were in Naomi’s shoes, as the president of the college, how would you have solved each of these crises?
Talk about Naomi’s relationship with her only daughter, Hannah. How do you see their relationship changing over the course of the book? What mistakes did each of them make? What could, or should, each of them have done differently? Does Naomi’s role as a single mother complicate her role as a college president, or vice
versa?
How does Webster’s history of racism and privilege factor into the current-day events of the novel? What role does the Native American conference play in the narrative? Is it possible for a school like Webster to reinvent itself and move fully into a progressive future? To what degree can a troubled history be erased or written over, in any institution? Are “good intentions” enough?
Much of the story revolves around the fate of Professor Nicholas Gall, yet he is almost completely absent from the action of the book. Why do you think Korelitz made this decision?
Why do you think Omar Khayal becomes the leader of the student protest? What draws other students to him? How do your feelings about him change over the course of the book?
Because of Naomi’s professional role, she has access to a lot of secrets that many other characters do not. Does having this broad, full knowledge give her the clearest-eyed perspective on the events of the story? Why or why not? Is there anything to which she remains blind?
When Omar and the other students begin the protest, Naomi sympathizes with them; she has a long history of personal activism, of “speaking truth to power.” What is different now that she herself is “the power”? Do you see parallels between Omar’s rise to leadership and Naomi’s? Who would you argue is ultimately the character with the most power by the end of the book?
Many of the characters in this novel are focused on truth, righteousness, and justice. How do you see the role of these principles playing out in the story? Do these ideals help, or hurt, the characters as they make life-changing decisions? Talk about the different ways that “truth” shapes the story.
The Devil and Webster ends with a surprising and powerful twist. At the end of the book, do you believe that there was a villain in the story? If so, who would it be, and why?
Author Q&A
1. What inspired you to write this novel?
I was in the middle of a perfectly ordinary conversation in my own living room when a guest started to tell me a story about something that happened on a certain college campus about twenty years earlier. My antennae started to hum. This story, it had so many of the things I love to think about, let alone to write about: the uneasy transition of 1960s idealism over the more complacent decades that followed, the clash between ideas and ideologies on a college campus, and above all, the stunning ability some people have to tell lies, and the equally stunning ability other people have to believe lies. The novel started to form in my head even before the conversation ended, and in fact I actively resisted investigating the real events my guest alluded to; I didn’t want them to interfere with the characters and events already taking shape.
2. What went into creating the fictional Webster College?
One of the great pleasures of writing fiction is the mad scientist opportunity to combine reality at will. Astute readers may note my appropriation of one American college’s origin story (or at least elements therein) and another American college’s current reputation, but in the universe The Devil and Webster occupies, Webster is all Webster. In its two and a half century history, it has meandered through the culture wars and responded to political, sociological, and economic realities as they themselves have meandered; this is a phenomenon well known to anyone who studies the lives of institutions, or spends longer than their own four undergraduate years in close observation of a college or university, as I have done (Princeton University faculty spouse, 1990–present). Educational institutions are living, changing entities. They kind of fascinate me.
3. This would have been a very different book if the protagonist had been a male college president. What decisions went into shaping Naomi’s character, a Jewish single mother, an outsider, and a feminist activist who finds herself as the face of the “establishment”?
I’m not sure how many of Naomi’s flaws are bound up in her gender, per se. She has a tendency to place her friendships unwisely (see Naomi Roth’s previous appearance in my 1999 novel, The Sabbathday River) and worries a bit too much about how she is perceived, but I think of these as human pitfalls, rather than specifically female ones. In a sense I never truly understood my own novel until I had the opportunity to draft jacket copy for the hardcover edition, a thorny little challenge that is often undertaken by editorial assistants. (As an editorial assistant at a major publisher in 1987, I performed this service for a number of novels and works of non-fiction. My efforts were of varying quality, but I’m grateful for the training, which has come in quite handy!) It was while attempting to convey the plot and meaning of The Devil and Webster in only a handful of sentences that I came up with the phrase: who we think we are and what we think we believe. This is Naomi’s great task—to reorient herself with respect to the principles that have guided her life, and recognize that it’s not just a question of the world having changed: she is also a different person than she once was.
4. The book is narrated from the close third person perspective. Why did you choose to tell the story solely from Naomi’s point of view, rather than looking at the complicated dilemma at the center of the book from multiple perspectives? How much did the role of limited perception—of self and others—shape the story you wanted to tell?
I think it’s the case for many artists that we play to our own self-perceived strengths, or more accurately go to great lengths to avoid our self-perceived flaws. (Let us pause to recall that the genre-altering physical contortions of Bob Fosse’s choreography have their source in the fact that Fosse himself was slightly pigeon-toed…) I am not…how shall I put this? … gifted as a writer of voices. My protagonists do not speak to the reader: they think, and the reader hears them do it. There’s a big difference. Luckily, I am far more interested in the voices in our heads than the voices that come out of our mouths, so my way of writing is going to keep me engaged for as long as writing itself does. Readers who want to hear the authentic voices of the American soul should hasten directly to Mark Twain, Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, Alice Walker, Jane Hamilton and others, as I frequently do, myself, but please come back to me when you want to see what happens when a character who is smug in her own understanding of the world gets the rug pulled out from underneath her. Third person narration is my lane, in other words, and I am swimming in it.
5. The Devil and Webster is a fast-paced, twisty, exciting read but, like the best books in the genre, carries a lot of deeper questions about truth, morality, and righteousness. Arguably, the most important part of a college education involves grappling with these larger, unsolvable questions. What lessons do you want your readers to take away from this book?
To my mind, the great gift of a university setting is that—ideally—it’s an intellectually supportive place to encounter the ideas of people who completely disagree with you. If you think about it, that’s a door that often closes as we move forward into a work environment. To go to college and spend time only with others of your background and ideology is to waste an extraordinary opportunity. No wonder I have always enjoyed stories with a university setting! I am fascinated by human behavior, especially bad human behavior, and though there is absolutely no hope of ever solving the problem of evil, that doesn’t mean we don’t benefit from hearing the stories again and again. I’m not all that big on lessons when it comes to fiction, but on a personal level I’m pretty sure Naomi and I try to live by the same pair of principles: Do what you can. Don’t make it worse. Not all that complicated, and it works for me!
6. What are you working on next?
Theater projects. Last fall my sister and I produced an immersive adaptation of James Joyce’s “The Dead” for the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York City. (My husband, Paul Muldoon, and I adapted the script from Joyce’s novella.) It was so much fun that our little production company, Dot Dot Productions LLC, now has a few other projects in development, including a revival of THE DEAD, 1904 this coming fall. As for the next novel, I’m one of those authors who needs to walk around without a clue for a year or two, and that’s fine—so long as I
’m alert and prepared when the next person tells me an amazing story and I suddenly think: I’m going to write a novel about that…
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