Any Book France Can Read, We Can Read Later

You may remember how, three months back, one GalleyCat reader tried to defend Horace Engdahl‘s condemnation of American literary culture by telling us that the French were so much more enlightened that they publish “American writers that American publishers find too politically incorrect,” and cited Nick McDonell‘s Guerre à Harvard as an example. At the time, we couldn’t find any mention of an upcoming McDonell novel, especially not one called War at Harvard; we didn’t know for sure whether that meant the book wasn’t going to be published here in the States, but we felt pretty confident that McDonell’s politics didn’t have anything to do with the book’s status either way.

Anyway, we received the new Grove/Atlantic catalog earlier this week, and there it was: An Expensive Education. In the full recognition that this is a glib oversimplification of an already simplified plot outline, the promotional copy suggests a cross between The Rules of Attraction and A Long Way Gone:

“Professor Susan Lowell has it made. A happily married mother of two in a tenure-track job at Harvard, she has just won a Pulitzer Prize for her book lionizing Hatashil, an East African freedom fighter. David Ayan is her singular Somali-born student. He is trying to become a member of one of Harvard’s elite finals clubs. He is trying to understand Jane, his girlfriend from a privileged background. He is trying, sometimes, just to get by in a foreign place. Michael Teak is a twenty-five-year-old recent Harvard grad working as an American intelligence operative who meets Hatashil in David’s village minutes before the massacre that will upend all their lives.”

A story like that, if McDonell’s writing takes it to its fullest potential, could possibly be the “definitive” statement on college life I Am Charlotte Simmons wanted to be; at the very least, it sounds like something we’d be interested in reading when it comes out this summer. The title’s a little bland, perhaps, but it’s still a damn sight better than War at Harvard. So we’re one up on the French there, at least.

(UPDATE: We’ve since been informed that An Expensive Education and The War at Harvard are, in fact, not the same text at all. We regret our error.)

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