LIFE OUTSIDE THE CONFINES
Higher Ed is a finely crafted tableau of misery with no clear-cut winner
Higher Ed, Tessa McWatt’s seventh novel, establishes from the start a sense of being permanently, mentally elsewhere.
It works, not just as a device, but as a mindset. The sooner we, as readers of a book or employees in an office, understand that everyone’s life is more real, more meaningful outside of work than inside, the better. Also the more entertaining.
In the opening pages, we meet 53-year-old Francine, a university administrator, dizzy from the recent collapse of an 11-year relationship. She is resigned to her militant bulimia as she tries to convince herself she is beautiful: “Francine Johnson will feel beautiful today, all day, she promises, or she will expire in the trying.”
We also meet Robin, a stumbling, self-deprecating Doc Marten-clad film professor pushing back on his mind’s urge to go mad, and his apt pupil Olivia, who accidentally meets her estranged father, Ed, while researching a dissertation on the rights of the dead. (Ed’s job is to bury the unknowns — people without families.)
Robin describes Olivia as “perched on a dangerous boundary” in relation to him. Robin, for the record, is a man set to coparent a child with his pregnant ex while texting “I’m thinking about you constantly” to Katrin, the barista he pines for but won’t commit to.
To flatten it all into a paragraph makes everything sound cheap, soap opera-esque, sure. But to see it unfold through five spotlighted perspectives is something else, and much more sincerely affecting. It’s easy to roll one’s eyes at salacious hearsay, but give each of the players in your brunch gossip sessions their own chapters and the contours of the game change, begin to take on the heaviness of life.
One will inevitably try to place these characters into a hierarchy of terribleness — who deserves peace and who deserves punishment? It’s a futile exercise, but one that helps justify all of us having to be stuck here.
All of these characters are in pain, but do they all deserve to be? Ed, pathetic and lovable in his innocence, abandoned his partner and child decades ago. Francine feels sorry for herself. Robin acts unfairly to those around him because he feels disappointed by having to settle into fatherhood, a role he doesn’t want, and by the knowledge that many students are unteachable, that his expertise is not of use to them, that his hard-fought career is just a job like anyone else’s.
Higher Ed is a tableaus of misery and effort. “It’s like being in a damn projector, that’s it” reads one of Francine’s final polyphonic vignettes. “This way of seeing things is like being the projector itself, like life has a movie and she’s showing it. All these people and their bodies: celluloid. And when life checks out, when it clicks off, it stays in other places, like in her hand, like in her finger. Like in her jaw.”
Katrin, the coffee-maiden of Robin’s capricious dreams, distinguishes herself from the glumness and pain of the other characters. It’s exhausting to watch her and Robin chase one other around London sending text messages soaked in promises and poetics.
“The feeling of wanting Robin is in her chest, her stomach, her arms, her legs and between them. There is not a part of her that doesn’t miss him.” Dignity is everything, though, and she won’t give in. The juxtaposition between all of the characters letting themselves be hurt by others, and Katrin protecting her own heart, even unsuccessfully, reads as a warning — don’t be like Francine, be more like Katrin! It’s not the professor who knows best, not the student, not the university administrator. Listen instead to the barista and her instincts.
Still, this story has no victor. It’s “torture here in the sunshine,” Robin says. Everyone’s secret, in the end, feels the same.