Calista's Into the World

Calista's latest effort, Into the World, a novel of manners set at a prestigious American university, seems almost quaint in light of recent campus tensions, but it provides a welcome respite from weightier matters.  Calista owes a clear debt to novels like Lucky Jim, but she updates its madcap aesthetic to take full advantage of the absurdities that abound in modern academia.  I confess I can't get enough of this kind of send-up of the modern university—you might even call me an academia nut!

As the book opens, Peter Goldthwaite, a professor of philosophy, has been accused of selling drugs to undergraduates.  The accusations are not quite true, but the disciplinary committee is unmoved by Goldthwaite's insistence that he never accepted money from the students.  However, Goldthwaite's friend and lawyer, the irrepressible Alain de la Droite, manages to shift the venue to the School of Humanities, which provides more fertile soil for his theory of the case.  There, de la Droite argues that it is spurious to identify present-day Goldthwaite with the individual who distributed the drugs more than a year ago.  Present-Goldthwaite bears no more resemblance to past-Goldthwaite than present-Goldthwaite does to any other professor, de la Droite claims.  But it would be wrong to punish one professor for another professor's actions.  Present-Goldthwaite is an innocent man!  By a narrow margin, Goldthwaite prevails, and the charges are dropped.

But Goldthwaite's nemesis, the sinister Dean Villiers, hatches a plan to take revenge on the arrogant philosopher.  A nontenured philosophy professor, Diane Rothblatt, acting as Villiers's cat's-paw, befriends Goldthwaite and encourages him to delve back into his work.  Eager to forget his trials and reinvigorated by the admiration of the young, attractive Rothblatt, Goldthwaite dusts off some of his old drafts and gets them into shape for publication.  After sending off his final revisions to the galleys, Goldthwaite invites de la Droite and Rothblatt to his house for celebratory champagne, and that night Goldthwaite and Rothblatt consummate their budding love affair.

But Rothblatt is riven by self-loathing, for Goldthwaite's moment of triumph also sets the stage for his destruction.  Later, at the launch party, just as Goldthwaite is preparing to give a few remarks, Villiers storms in with the campus police and escorts Goldthwaite off campus.  The professor stands accused of plagiarizing large passages of his new book from the work of past-Goldthwaite, who has been adjudicated to be a separate legal person.  It's an open-and-shut case:  side-by-side comparisons of the just-published book next to Goldthwaite's prior drafts reveal that entire passages have been copied verbatim.  Rothblatt confesses her duplicity to de la Droite and flees, afraid to face Goldthwaite's disappointment.

De la Droite, calling Goldthwaite's destruction on the rocks of his (de la Droite's) legal strategy "the story of my life," becomes despondent and gives up hope for his good friend.  But Rothblatt returns and startles him from his brandy-soaked self-pity with an audacious suggestion:  Goldthwaite's book is plagiarism only if it fails to credit past-Goldthwaite for his intellectual labor.  But the book simply names "Peter Goldthwaite" as the author.  All they have to do to prevail is to convince the disciplinary committee that the reference of "Peter Goldthwaite" is fixed on past-Goldthwaite, not present-Goldthwaite.  If Villiers had waited a few more minutes before raiding the launch party, present-Goldthwaite would undoubtedly have taken credit for the book, sealing his fate.  But Villiers's impatience has left a small door open, though which de la Droite must steer Rothblatt's intricate argument.

Rothblatt throws herself into the defense.  It is hard going—this is not her area of expertise, and she has never had much patience with arguments about reference.  But the bigger problem is that Goldthwaite's brilliant early work, the work that earned him tenure, involved "problematizing" the theory of reference.  Rothblatt and de la Droite must overcome not only Villiers's ingenious arguments (he has recruited Goldthwaite's many rivals from the philosophy department to develop the prosecution's case) but also Goldthwaite's own philosophical positions.

And so the novel skips cheerfully into 50 pages of dense philosophical argument, leavened by Calista's sharp irony and almost slapstick sensibility.  (You can get a sense of the issues at stake here.)  Calista gets a lot of mileage out of the mismatch between the sophistication of the arguments trotted out by de la Droite and Villiers, on the one hand, and the disciplinary committee's befuddled attempts to follow them, on the other.  I won't reveal Goldthwaite's fate, noting only that Calista has a few philosophical tricks up her sleeve to keep the plot aloft until she sticks the landing.

I hesitate to compare the book to other philosophical works of fiction.  Dave's famous "philosophical mystery novel" Will We Ever Arrive? (inspired by a webcomic of the same name) is simply a reprint of his magisterial tome on artificial intelligence, with a new opening chapter in which Detective Montrose discovers that the murder weapon is a magisterial tome on artificial intelligence, which is then replicated for the reader's edification.  No conclusion to the mystery is provided, a move that Dave justifies on the grounds of "exercising the atrophied American imagination."  Into the World is every bit as erudite as Will We Ever Arrive?, but its ratio of fiction to philosophy is far more satisfying.

But however you categorize Into the World, it provides a welcome escape into the world of ideas and the lighter side of the modern university.  When I finished the book and put it down, I found myself wanting to stay a little while longer in its unpredictable but oddly comforting universe.