The Brightness - by Chad Harbach (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

"The Brightness is a monumental campus novel, full of smart and mercurial characters who feel as real as your own roommates... [it] combines the ambitious scope and narrative vitality of a nineteenth century novel with a sharp and compassionate eye for the way we live now." --Tom Perrotta, author of Ghost Town

From the bestselling author of literary sensation The Art of Fielding comes an urgent, deeply felt story of friendship, art, love, and grief, following two young women on the brink of irrevocable change.

Parties and weddings, messy hookups and marred friendships, art and love and grief--The Brightness follows the electric, chaotic, everything-can-happen lives of Pella and her best friend, Irma, as they fumble their way out of sleepy, Midwestern Westish College and into a larger world that will upend their connection and everything they thought they understood about their own place within it.

At 27, Pella's life looks settled: she's a recent college grad, engaged to Mike, her longtime boyfriend, and helping her friend Owen pull off his own destination wedding on Block Island. But over that wild wedding weekend, Pella's past and present collide spectacularly, blowing up her plans and sending her spiraling toward an unplanned future in New York City. Meanwhile, back at Westish College, 21-year-old Irma's involvement with a politically charged prank--one that has roiled both the campus and the world beyond--threatens to derail her brilliant future. As Irma and Pella cycle through possibilities and identities, both navigate the heights and depths of passion and ambition, and the incalculable wages of love and loss.

In stunning scenes and spectacular characters--each drawn with an almost superhuman vividness and humanity--Chad Harbach captures that specific, shimmering anxiety of your twenties when life still feels wide open, even as hard and irreversible choices start closing in.

Energetic, funny, and deeply human, this much-anticipated follow-up to The Art of Fielding confirms Chad Harbach as one of the most accomplished and deep-seeing writers of our time.

Review Quotes

"As in his acclaimed debut, Harbach immerses readers in the world of Westish, but he broadens his scope, plunging his characters into new environments and broaching topics such as love and talent and literature, as well as campus sexual assault, feminism, the fraught politics of victimhood, and the volatile media landscape that complicates all of these. Apt evocations of Shakespeare's The Tempest abound. While this novel can certainly be enjoyed independent of its predecessor, those who've read the first book will more fully appreciate the continued growth and dilemmas of Pella, Mike, and Owen (the Skrimmer makes appearances, too), to say nothing of the clever metafictional twist Harbach pulls off via Owen's novel, which is titled--well, take a guess. Brilliant, poignant, and absorbing."--Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"The Brightness is a very long novel that doesn't feel long at all. Like a throwback to novels of years yore, this is a character-driven drama in which we as readers become intimately invested in these peoples' highs and lows. When you spend this much time with people you grow to like very much, real or fictional, you can't help but become a little attached, sometimes annoyed, but ultimately fascinated to find out how it all winds up for them."--Chicago Review of Books

"Fifteen years is a long time. Fifteen years ago, Taylor Swift was a country singer and Prince William still had hair. Yet The Brightness is so full of life, surprises, close observation, spiraling and interlocking plots, sharp new characters wheeling into view, striking set pieces, overlapping literary allusions and neo-Updikean craftsmanship that one can feel, on nearly every page, where every month of that time went . . . [Harbach] knows as much about the undersides of the Manhattan cultural world as he does about baseball and so much else. When he writes a hangover or a dance-off scene, it's a hangover or dance-off scene for the ages . . . It's a bold move for a male novelist in 2026 to put a woman at the center of a novel, as if he were Flaubert creating Emma Bovary or Tolstoy Anna Karenina. Pella . . . is a strong and sympathetic controlling presence, one with a roomy humanity, and the reader feels lucky to be able to tag along beside her." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"The Brightness brilliantly illuminates [youth's] hopes, loves, and fears."--Christian Science Monitor

"The Brightness returns to Westish roughly five years after The Art of Fielding and features many of the same characters, yet it wouldn't be right to call it a sequel. You might think of this novel as a rebuttal or counterpoint to its forerunner, a book that replaces roseate campus fantasy with spikier societal conflicts . . . Rich in love, camaraderie and allusions to Herman Melville... [Harbach's] characterizations are generous and insightful."--The Wall Street Journal

"Harbach demonstrates a profound gift for observing individuals and their relationships . . . The Brightness is beautiful and perceptive... Passages like [his] are not only a joy to read--they convey something fundamental about people, who are always in conflict with themselves, managing a jumble of desires that pull in wildly different and sometimes mutually exclusive directions."--The New Yorker

"Masterfully captures the dazzling ennui of being in your 20s. The novel follows Pella and Irma, two best friends at a Midwestern college whose once-optimistic futures are totally derailed in this charming portrait of the promise and pain of coming of age."--Marie Claire

"The Brightness feels Shakespearean . . . characters pontificating, misinterpreting other's pontifications, cracking lewd jokes and saying profound things with the same conviction, compounding their predicaments with unforced errors . . . The mix of emotions - affection, admiration, and competition - is as complex as anything readers found in the Harpooner's dugout in The Art of Fielding. Either story line - Pella and Irma, or Irma and Dahlia - would've carried a novel, but together they create something of a multiplier effect."--Poets & Writers magazine

"This is the long-awaited sequel to Harbach's acclaimed 2011 baseball/campus novel The Art of Fielding. We return to Westish College -- but we put down the bats and balls and, instead, focus on sexual assault, feminism, campus politics, and the high costs of speaking out."--NPR

"If you only read one book this fall . . .The Brightness -- arriving 15 years after [Harbach's] breakthrough baseball book, The Art of Fielding -- returns us to that novel's small Wisconsin college, only this time [it's] about female friendship and the politics of 2016."--Chicago Tribune

"In this funny, profound campus novel, Westish College is roiled by a prank that casts a spotlight on the school. Meanwhile, bright but chaotic grad Pella's life gets upended at a splashy wedding." --People

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE FALL: The New York Times Book Review - People Magazine - CBS Saturday Morning - Oprah Daily - The Associated Press - Country Living - Chicago Review of Books - Lit Hub - Milwaukee Magazine

"The Brightness perfectly captures what it's like to be in your twenties and facing down life's enormous question: Who am I going to be? It's also a good reminder to the rest of us that the answer to that question is never a settled thing. A brilliant and enchanting story about friendship, love, ambition, and growing up. I've been waiting for Chad Harbach's second novel ever since I devoured his first one. This was worth the wait." --Nathan Hill, author of Wellness

"The Brightness is a monumental campus novel, full of smart and mercurial characters who feel as real as your own roommates. Chad Harbach's absorbing, beautifully written follow-up to The Art of Fielding combines the ambitious scope and narrative vitality of a nineteenth century novel with a sharp and compassionate eye for the way we live now." --Tom Perrotta, author of Ghost Town

"The Brightness captures (a.) what it was like to be a girl in college in 2016, which I was but which I imagine Chad Harbach wasn't, which makes it all the more impressive; (b.) the complicated nature of female friendship; and (c.) the wonderful, excruciating confusion of growing up. I could not put it down, except when I had to so I could savor it." --Madeline Cash, author of Lost Lambs

"The Brightness is such a wonder of a novel. I wanted to live in it, in part because Chad Harbach has built something that feels less like a sequel than a universe. He has that rare, tremendous gift of assuring you you're in the hands of an absolute master. I was besotted from the first page and for every one of the nearly seven hundred that followed." --Laurie Frankel, author of Enormous Wings

"A deeply absorbing, vivid, and humane novel about the world as it is, the world as it could be, and the roles that provocation and imagination might play in closing the gap."--Lisa Halliday, author of Asymmetry

"Fifteen years after popping one into the bleachers with his best-selling debut, The Art of Fielding, Harbach returns with a sophomore effort that finds two Midwestern best friends reckoning with the messy realities of young adulthood."--New York Times

"What may surprise readers this time out is the depth of feeling and insight Harbach brings to The Brightness's female characters, especially Pella and Irma. The ache that sheltered, studious Irma feels to be closer to the wilder and more charismatic Dahlia rings with authenticity, as does the mix of pain, jealousy, and pride Pella experiences watching Irma come into her own."--Publishers Weekly

"With prose that is characteristically assured, detailed, and wise, [The Brightness] is sure to be the Big Cozy Read of the autumn."--Lit Hub, Most Anticipated Books of the Year

About the Author

Chad Harbach is the author of the bestselling novel The Art of Fielding, which has been translated into more than twenty languages, and a founder of n+1. He was raised in Racine, Wisconsin, and educated at Harvard and the University of Virginia. He lives in Northern California with his son Ansel, and their dog, Curtis.