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As the 21st century has trudged from mewling infancy to young adulthood, a new type of book has emerged, dominating bookshops and prize lists alike: the MFA novel. In the US there are well over 300 MFA — master of fine arts — programmes, which offer creative writing tuition from published authors and the chance to have your writing critiqued by experts and peers. More than 20,000 people apply to these degrees each year, and most of the students who are accepted shell out extortionate sums.
What does this mean for literature? In 2016 The Atlantic magazine got a computer to analyse the differences between novels by writers with MFAs and those without, and found that MFA novels contained more references to “lawns, lakes, counters, stomachs, and wrists”, which was not exactly groundbreaking.
In reality, the difference is tricky to pinpoint but MFA novelists tend towards lots of dialogue, arch plots and heavy helpings of irony. That doesn’t make them good or bad — the category is broad enough to include Kiley Reid (sparkling, witty, wonderful) and Ocean Vuong (meh) — but the typical offering can be well crafted but rather sterile.
Emily Adrian teaches on the MFA programme at Sewanee, the University of the South. And her fourth book for adults, Seduction Theory, might just be a skilful satire of the MFA novel. On page one we are told that we are reading Roberta Green’s “Thesis Submitted to Edwards University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts”. But, at least at first, it’s easy to forget this metaliterary fact as we enjoy her sharp, clever story of two misbehaving academics.
Simone and Ethan work at Edwards University, Londonville, as creative writing professors. Simone is the high-flyer in their marriage: her memoir Motherless, about the death of her mother, won her a tenured position (Ethan is the “spousal hire”). She is beautiful and cool, with “fifty-four thousand followers … [an] internet friendship with the creator and star of an HBO show … [a] nine-hundred-dollar slip dress she wore to the National Book Awards”.
Ethan, while attractive and reasonably talented, gives off a faint whiff of mediocrity. His own book, The Muse, might have won him a $250,000 advance, but it was all about Simone’s grief. And since it didn’t sell nearly enough copies to earn back the advance, his publisher has been avoiding him ever since: “He was aware of being a novelist who hadn’t sold a book since he was twenty-six.”
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Under these circumstances, it is both unbelievable and completely predictable that Ethan has a short-lived affair with his secretary, Abigail, a young single mother who has, he admits in spite of his lust, “crusty eyelashes and fleshy earlobes”. Will Simone ever forgive him?
But you’ve read that story before. What makes it interesting is that Simone has been secretly pushing the boundaries of her marriage and career through her friendship with a graduate student, one Roberta Green. The pair haven’t had sex, but they have been training for a marathon together, and sharing an office, a sofa and at one point even a shower. Poor Roberta falls painfully in love.
And so this thesis is, we discover halfway through, an elaborate act of literary revenge — and Roberta is an utterly unreliable narrator. At one point Simone, enduring a bookshop event on a road trip with her unfaithful husband, contemplates dragging him into the bathroom and working things out on a more physical level. Until Roberta intrudes on the moment: “I will not saddle her with the indignity of the bathroom blowjob.” So did she do it or not? Is Roberta making it all up?
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The first two thirds of the novel, which picks apart the complicated marriage of Simone and Ethan, is deeply enjoyable. But once Roberta inserts herself in the narrative it all becomes increasingly claustrophobic. Perhaps she should have listened to the advice doled out by Simone in their first class together: “What Roberta’s story needs is less Roberta.” Paradoxically, Seduction Theory falls victim to the fatal flaw of the MFA novels it seems to satirise — being too clever by half.
Seduction Theory by Emily Adrian (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £18.99 pp224). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
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