Blame Sally Rooney. In the years since the Irish author’s debut, Conversations with Friends, there has been nothing a young writer likes more than to write about beautiful, disaffected twentysomethings drowning in directionless ennui. They do not need quote marks for speech or much of a plotline. Heck, maybe they don’t even need character development. That’s nihilist praxis, baby!
Combine that with the current fixation with campus novels – Sydney’s Diana Reid is the local poster girl for this hybrid – and you have Higher Education, the first novel from Western Australian-born, London-based writer Kira McPherson.
Ever self-aware, the novel describes itself as being about “being young and feeling old, and feeling smart and being dumb”. Indeed, the cusp of adulthood is a particularly potent period through which to explore a coming of age that is often intertwined with the complications of politics, both social and interpersonal. Done well, the post-millennial malaise novel can be funny, sad and revealing – see Elif Batuman’s 2017 bildungsroman The Idiot, which wryly pierced the heart of post-adolescent chutzpah through its maddeningly precocious yet charming protagonist, Selin.
But it’s not as successful here. Higher Education follows Sam, who is 20 and has just started law school when the novel begins. Lost and lonesome with a dysfunctional family – the threat of her brother going to prison hangs heavily over the story – and only a vague picture of her desired future, Sam struggles to fit in at university among her privileged, trendy peers. She finds solace and friendship in an older woman, Julia, the wife of her university lecturer who also becomes her mentor – before long, Sam’s feelings turn romantic.
There’s plenty to explore within these relationships, particularly as the novel spans the five years of Sam’s degree – but its sluggish pace and dry writing make that time period seem especially lengthy. Most crucially, the characters are thinly drawn – it’s difficult to distinguish them from one another through their flat, unmarked dialogue and lack of distinctive personality traits. It is hard, then, to muster much emotion towards any of them or their plights.
Even the protagonist is held at a distance; we get no real insight into her motivations or feelings, other than a sense of alienation from the class tensions that play out at uni. These are revealed through small interactions between Sam and her peers: when she meets her friend Mink for the first time, Sam is immediately asked what school she went to, and dodges the question. These moments remind her that she is an outsider, especially as she becomes more deeply entwined in the group. Sam’s problems at home sit in stark contrast to the sophisticated world she finds herself immersed in.
But that sophistication seems to exist only at surface level. The characters often offer random observations that don’t reveal much about either themselves or their world. Philosophical discussions (on the law, on morality) happen within the context of a lecture theatre, but the questions are asked and then swiftly abandoned – and with seemingly no tangible impression on the characters, these conversations come off as pretentious. Perhaps this is true to life – young people at uni do tend to think they’re more worldly than they really are – but it becomes exhausting to read. It brings to mind another recent Australian debut, Indyana Schneider’s 28 Questions, which similarly revolved around first year uni-style musings to no conclusive point.
For something with so much buildup, the relationship between Sam and Julia also fails to land. While teacher-student relationships are often ripe for interrogation, taking in the politics of desire and power, the connection between these characters is tenuous – it’s unclear what draws these women together, other than both having lost their fathers (and even that is only glanced at). Sexual and romantic tension builds across the novel, even if it is just within Sam – but the payoff is anticlimactic, as it is for the plotline involving Sam’s brother. There’s a slow burn, and then there’s this.
“You’re so worried about being young,” Julia says to Sam at one point. “You have to learn to enjoy it.” Perhaps an older Sam would agree, and perhaps that’s the point – but Higher Education misses the mark, yielding little emotional or intellectual reward. As McPherson writes on the endless tedium of Sam’s studies and life, “it all goes on like it did before”.
Higher Education by Kira McPherson is out now through Ultimo Press
