Book Review: An Academic Affair
Here’s my review of An Academic Affair by Jodi McAlister. Leave a comment if you’ve read it, plan to read it, or have any book recs to share. And don’t miss today’s writing prompt.
An Academic Affair by Jodi McAlister is literally dedicated to those who have had to navigate a broken and cutthroat academic jobs market before. It’s a novel for those who understand the scholarly value of romance and popular fiction (Hello! A ton of ‘classics’ we read today were popular and or dismissed as ‘low-brow trash’ when they were first published, and don’t even get me started on what people thought of Shakespeare’s work when it first came out…). It’s also a novel for those who want to see more women in important decision-making positions in academia.
Yes, this novel is mainly a romance novel. But it’s also a novel that addresses and plays with romance tropes as much as it addresses and touches on literary devices and classic literature. The main characters quote literature to each other often— in a non-cheesy way, I might add— which is obviously romantic and interesting for lit nerds like me. Of course, this novel doesn’t offer close readings or any sort of deep literary analysis because it isn’t supposed to be an actual academic text. Though Sadie Shaw, one of the main characters, does constantly bring up the concept of eucatastrophe throughout the novel, which is a compelling concept to consider.
“Eucatastrophe, in Tolkien’s words, is ‘the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous turn .’ In mine, it’s the moment in a story where, when it seems like all is lost, that things are going to be awful forever, that the only possible endings are full of misery and despair, something good happens.”
“‘Eucatastrophe is joy poignant as grief. The joy cannot be truly felt in a world where the grief isn’t possible.’ ‘And the catastrophe is the narrative fork between the joy and the grief.’”
The novel itself, however, does not bring eucatastrophe to the fore entirely, I am afraid. While I was rooting for Sadie and Jonah’s relationship and success in academia throughout the novel, I did not feel Sadie’s grief of losing temporary contact with her sister as high-stakes enough, especially since they were able to reconcile quite easily at the end of the novel, when joy was possible after her sister came back to help them with their academic careers. Other readers may not agree with this opinion, but I was still waiting to experience genuine loss and grief, which never really seemed to surface to me.
I also wanted to witness more of Sadie’s and Jonah’s intense arguments and fights directly throughout the novel, even if they were introduced as flashbacks, instead of only being told about them secondhand or as an afterthought. While I enjoyed reading about their sweet moments together, I never really felt that they were true rivals, though we were constantly being told they were. I wanted to experience the intensity of their conflicting convictions and separate areas of work as much as I wanted to see their tenderness toward each other and how they eventually compromise intellectually as well as romantically, I suppose, especially since they wrote hundreds of lectures together.
That being said, however, it was impossible to put this book down, as I was enraptured by Jonah’s and Sadie’s relationship and how it slowly evolved over the course of the book. And I think Jonah Fisher will go down in history as one of my all-time favorite book boyfriends, which certainly isn’t nothing. I mean, just read this passage from one of Jonah’s chapters:
“‘I will concede,’ I said, ‘that you said a pretty mean thing to your sister. But you’ve spent fifteen years saying mean things to me and I have loved you every second of them anyway.’ I took her hand in mine and pressed my lips to her knuckles, just below the rings I’d put on her finger. ‘I’m not telling you this because I expect anything from you,’ I said. ‘I never have. I never will. I certainly don’t deserve anything from you. If you want to walk away from me, I’ll let you go. But I need you to hear me when I tell you that I’m not going to walk away from you. I love you, Sadie, and there is nothing you can say or do that will ever make me want to leave you.’”
Overall, this will be a romance novel I will recommend to readers who want the romance and popular fiction genres to be taken more seriously, as well as those lit nerds who enjoy literary quotes scattered throughout an entertaining and engaging text. And I’m looking forward to reading the next book in the Love Notes series by this author.
Here are some other passages from the novel I enjoyed:
“I was not a superstitious person. Devoting my life to studying stories had hammered home to me how much people used them to make sense of their lives. There was some innate tendency in humans that made us read our lives like they were books, scripted by some higher power. A tall, dark, handsome stranger will enter your life, we might hear, and off we’d go, reading too much into an innocent conversation with the man behind us in the coffee line. I knew, intellectually, that it was just a bottle of wine. No higher power had guided me here. It was just a coincidence. I knew this. And yet all I could perceive it as was a symbol.” (Sadie)
“There was a famous narrative theorist named Paul Ricœur who distinguished between ‘clock time’ and ‘human time.’ Clock time was measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days: the things we think of as the basic building blocks of time. Human time, though, was measured in events: the basic building blocks of story—and thus, because humans love nothing more than to narrativize their own experiences, of our lives.” (Sadie)
“”I just don’t think the language of catastrophe is useful here,’ he’d said. ‘Isn’t the whole point of romance novels that they’re pink and fluffy and nothing bad ever happens?’ I’d opened my mouth to speak, but Jonah got in before me. ‘You’re misunderstanding what a catastrophe is, Peter.’ He was sitting in the second row, tweed-clad arms stretched across the backs of the empty seats on either side of him. ‘It’s not a disaster; it’s a dramatic term. It’s all through the literature on ancient theater. Four stages: prologue, protasis, epitasis, catastrophe. The catastrophe is the moment when it all hangs on the precipice. If it goes one way, it’s a tragedy, and everyone will probably die; if it goes the other, it’s a comedy, and everyone will get their happy ending.’” (Sadie)
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© This work is not available for artificial intelligence (AI) training. All Rights Reserved by K.E. Creighton; Creighton’s Compositions LLC.
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Today’s Writing Prompt
Writing Prompt: An Affair to Remember
Write a memorable fictional scene in which two people are having an affair, or are considering having an affair. Or write a journal entry about an affair you have experienced or witnessed yourself.
Writing Tip:
Before you start writing, consider: Who is involved in this affair? What about the affair makes it memorable? And what internal thoughts and feelings are those involved in the affair having, if they are known?
