The Brightness - by Chad Harbach (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"With prose that is characteristically assured, detailed, and wise, [The Brightness] is sure to be the Big Cozy Read of the autumn."

About the Author