‘My Education’ a scorching hot read

My Education
By Susan Choi 
(Viking)

Susan Choi’s “My Education” is a chaise-longue literary page-turner par excellence: sexy, smart, well-plotted, jammed with observations witty and profound, and so well-written it occasionally leaves you gasping.

I guess I’m in love. And so is the protagonist of “My Education,” Regina Gottlieb. In 1992, Regina arrives on the campus of a Cornell-like university as a graduate student in writing. The first week she catches sight of the notorious professor Nicholas Brodeur. “He wore a long duster coat, in the heat of September. His filthy blond hair stuck up and out in thatchy spikes from heavy use of some kind of pomade, as if it were 1982, not ‘92, and he wore Lennon shades with completely black lenses, as if it were outdoors, not in, and overall, in his resemblance to a Joy Division poster, he comported himself as if twenty and not, as I’d come to find out, almost forty.”

Intrigued beyond reason, Regina signs up for Brodeur’s advanced seminar in Chaucer, a subject about which she knows nothing and which she attends in a get-up she describes as “Catwoman of Academe.”

Despite her novice status, Regina ends up becoming Brodeur’s teaching assistant and is soon after invited to a dinner party at his house. At this Bunuel-worthy event, at which the guests drink a case of wine before any food appears, Regina meets Brodeur’s wife, Martha Hallett. In a shocking twist, the two end up making out in the solarium.

As she moves into the Brodeur-Hallett orbit, Regina takes with her the fourth character in this love-square (like a love triangle, only more complicated). That is her housemate, the completely unforgettable Dutra.

The second part of the book is set 15 years later, in 2007. Despite a bit of awkward catching-up with the characters and an abrupt walk-on of the events of Sept. 11 ― fiction, like real life, is still struggling with this disruption ― the section not only resolves the plot but deepens and clarifies the meaning of the narrative. A key moment comes when Regina, flying from New York to California, feels herself become all at once middle-aged and realizes she has never before understood the meaning of the term. (MCT)