Happy news for anyone who enjoys getting riled up over novels about hot-button issues: that fight-or-flight response will skyrocket thanks to The Brightness, Chad Harbach's excellent follow-up to 2011's The Art of Fielding. Like John Irving, Harbach is a maximalist whose specialty is to serve up a literary feast, with multiple characters and intersecting storylines over more than 600 pages. For this sophomore novel, Harbach returns to Wisconsin's fictional Westish College. College baseball players Mike Schwartz and Owen Dunne are back, but this time the focus is on Westish women. And they're not happy with the men.
The protagonist is Pella Affenlicht; in the first book, Pella arrived at Westish, where her father became the college's president, to escape the man she married at 18. Now it's 2015, she's 27, and she and Mike are engaged. He's a coach and assistant athletic director, but she'd like him to apply to law school. She doesn't know what she wants for herself, however, aside from helping Owen, a successful novelist, prepare for his wedding to Martin Tilly and celebrate their "recently decriminalized love." Meanwhile, Pella's friend, 21-year-old Irma Friske, and two other women students pursue "the project"--a prank in which a provocative two-word phrase is tattooed on the foreheads of two drunk football jocks--and the national attention it receives, including from the Brightness, a website dedicated to women's issues. There's much more here as the novel boldly confronts infidelity, ambition, campus sexual assault, and more with moral complexity and shrewd sympathy. It's terrific. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer