SEATTLE — Seattle author Sonora Jha would like to make it clear, "for the record," that her new campus-set novel "The Laughter," out now from HarperCollins, is not about Seattle University, where she is a professor and associate dean. (She smiled, though, when she said it.)
"Academia is a rich, rich place for writing satire," Jha said, in an interview at a Capitol Hill coffeehouse last month. (Sample sentence from her book: "Few events are as shorn of mirth as those in which well-dressed faculty attempt to party.") From the long tradition of campus novels, she cited John Williams' "Stoner," Richard Russo's "Straight Man" and Julia May Jonas' recent "Vladimir" as favorites. But Jha said she wasn't seeing anything in the genre that spoke to her specifically as a woman of color — other than the Netflix series "The Chair," which "goes so far, but not far enough ... There are so many people of color on campuses now, and we need to tell a story from their point of view."
But something curious happened when she began to work on what would eventually become "The Laughter," a story narrated by Oliver, an aging, self-satisfied academic who has developed an obsession with his new Pakistani Muslim colleague, Ruhaba. Initially, she had planned to write the novel from three alternating points of view: Oliver, Ruhaba, and Ruhaba's young nephew Adil, who has arrived from France to stay with his aunt. It was 2016 when she began, during the presidential election, and she was intrigued by the idea of "the white gaze, the white imagination, this rumbling of a white man's discontent and the backlash, and all of that." She came up with Oliver's voice, and thought she would soon add the other two.
