Eugenides's third novel follows three Brown University graduates in the early 1980s as they navigate love, ambition, and intellectual pretension. While the campus in the book is Brown, Eugenides drew heavily on his own University of Michigan years for the atmosphere of academic life — the seminars, the rivalries, the sense that ideas matter urgently. Anyone who has spent time in a serious university town will recognize the world he describes.
The novel is a sharp, affectionate portrait of the kind of intellectually intense environment that Ann Arbor cultivates. It captures what it feels like to be young and overeducated in a place where everyone is reading the same books and arguing about them over coffee.