College scandals: Lords of Serendipity, by Randy Boyagoda, reviewed
Randy Boyagoda has buried the campus novel in its grave. The setting of Lords of Serendipity is not the ‘city of aquatint’ and ‘autumnal mists’ of Brideshead Revisited, nor is it brimming with the forbidden knowledge and drunken cabals of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. This modern university is much more mundane: ‘All flatness and shine.’ Overseas students settle for the brutalist architecture of a provincial American college, dreaming of taking their families to the West after graduation. Jack, a statistics professor, works overtime to send his daughter to a picturesque liberal arts school while he himself remains in a concrete block where colleagues forget about his existence.
