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I was very torn on this book. I kept hearing echoes of "Oleanna" and "Disclosure" as I read. I mean, taking things that happen quite often - sexual harassment and sexual relationships between male professors and female students - and doing a bit of role reversal? How shocking, how transgressive, how...completely obnoxious. It's about as edgy as someone who shows more concern for the few men who might be falsely accused of rape than for the multitudes of women who are actually raped. Never mind all of the women who are actually sexually harassed! What about the one dude who is falsely accused of sexual harassment? WHO WILL THINK OF TEH MENZ?!?!?!!!1

I also found the positioning of the campus feminist group as the villain of the story rather annoying. Maybe it's just a feature of small liberal arts schools, because at the two big state universities I attended, the campus women's groups and the women's studies departments were more like perfunctory nods toward multiculturalism and less terroristic enforcers of joyless political correctness that ruins all of the fun for everyone (and by everyone, I mean the dudes).

So why did I give this book three stars? Because it was entertaining, because Prose made a lot of points about writing - particularly creative writing dispatched in service of a political ideology - that I agree with, and because she made the self-destruction of one sadsack of a man so compulsively readable. Because, make no mistake about it, the narrator completely self-destructs. The student was just the catalyst for it. Swendon was clearly unhappy with everything about his life, even his marriage and his wife, about which he spent much brain power trying to convince himself that he really was happy, that he really did have a good life, that he truly loved his wife. He loathed his students and his colleagues, but most of all he loathed himself, and he tried to make up for it by being an insufferable snob. He was thoroughly unlikeable, mired in a clusterfuck of his own making, and yet Prose managed to stir up something resembling sympathy in my heart.