The more academia has broken your heart, the more you’ll love RF Kuang’s new novel. Katabasis knows the slow grind of postgrad precarity: the endless grant grubbing and essay marking; the thesis chapters drafted, redrafted and quietly ignored by a supervisor who can’t be bothered to read – let alone reply to – an email. Living semester to semester, pay shrinking, workload metastasising, cannon fodder in a departmental forever war. Katabasis knows how it feels to spend your best thinking years doing grunt work to further someone else’s ideas, clinging to the bottom rung of a ladder you will never be allowed to climb: less an ivory tower than a pyramid scheme.
Academia is a hellscape; Katabasis just makes it literal. The American author’s sixth novel is an infernal twist on the campus farce: David Lodge with demons. Kuang’s previous book, 2023’s Yellowface, satirised the publishing industrial complex with an irresistible mix of gallows humour and gossip. A tale of toxic allies, commodified identity and hollow moralising, it was lapped up – with predictable irony – by the very people it skewered, like a real-life version of the stunt novel in Percival Everett’s Erasure. The year before Yellowface, in the cult hit Babel, she invented an elaborate, counter-historical version of Oxford University – and then blew it up. A literary Rhodes Must Fall.
