It Will Come to Me A Novel

by GORDON, EMILY FOX

• ISBN13: 9780385525886
• ISBN10: 0385525885
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-08-17
• Publisher: Random House

Summary

Ben Blau is the reluctant chair of the philosophy department of the Lola Dees Institute, surrounded by a bestiary of academic innocents and opportunists. His wife, Ruth-a writer whose early success never quite blossomed into a career-nurtures sometimes noisy and sometimes private rebellions against the conventions of academic life. Their lives have settled, if not always comfortably, into a dull ceremonial round of convocations, committee meetings, and pot-luck dinners. To Ruth it seems that nothing will ever change. Except that this year a new couple has arrived on campus: an ethereal, celebrated young memoirist and her husband, an intellectual jack-of-all-trades and perpetual misfit. Something about these two throws the staid academic world of the Lola Dees Institute into comic chaos and revives Ruthrs"s hopes that she might become, once again, the writer she used to be.

Author Biography

Emily Fox Gordon is an award-winning essayist and the author of two memoirs, Mockingbird Years: A Life In and Out of Therapy and Are You Happy? A Childhood Remembered Her work has appeared in American Scholar, Time, Pushcart Prize Anthology XXIII and XXIX, the New York Times Book Review, Boulevard, and Salmagundi. She lives in Houston and teaches writing workshops at Rice University.

Excerpts

Chapter one
professor Blau!" the student cried out, bounding up the steps. A frenetic session of handshaking ensued, but Ruth could see by Ben's warm vague smile that this young man had him at a momentary disadvantage.
The student, or ex-student, was sandy-haired and sunburnt. His aviator sunglasses hung from a braided leather cord around his neck. Now he was telling them about his year as an intern in a senator's office and how he'd gotten into the Stanford program. Remember Alison, his girlfriend? She was in med school and they were getting married in December. Here he glanced shyly at Ruth.
A pause. The preliminaries had been gotten through, and Ruth knew all too well what would happen next. The student would ask Ben's advice and Ben would dispense it. Ruth would stand there, trapped and excluded, shifting from one foot to the other in an ecstasy of boredom. Twenty minutes, forty minutes. At some point the conversation would begin to wind down. After a long diminuendo of farewells the student would excuse himself. But even then, the danger would not have passed. It had happened more than once that even as Ben's interlocutor had turned and taken several steps away, Ben remembered some final piece of advice--a colleague to look up, a course to avoid--and actually called the student back. The coffin sprang open and the grinning corpse of the conversation sat bolt upright.
Now was the moment to slip away. She smiled her quick sideways smile at Ben, who was too involved in talk to notice, and withdrew to the stone railing. Looking down, she saw a scene of young people standing in conversational knots. This place, known as Nirvana, was the graduate-student bar, a beer-dispensing station operating out of the basement of the chemistry building. Patrons descended into that dank grotto to order their seventy-five-cent bocks and lagers and carried them up into the light of late afternoon to drink them under the dappled shade of live oaks. They arrayed themselves around the grounds of the building, sitting on benches, leaning against brick, ranged along the steps of the external stone staircase leading to the second floor. Nirvana was a chronically endangered institution. For years, a counselor at the Wellness Center had been waging a letter-writing campaign against it in the student paper, and the proprietors had recently been put on notice that it would be shut down by the university if a handicapped ramp was not installed.
Ben liked to spend an hour or two here on a Friday afternoon perched at the very top of the stone steps, where he could pick his students out of the crowd, or those of his colleagues--not many showed up--to whom he wanted to speak. Ruth had pointed out several times that he was just as visible to people down there as they were to him, but the panoramic view seemed to make him feel secure. On these occasions he drank one beer, two at most. Ruth drank two and wanted two more.
She looked down directly on the neatly parted blond head of a young woman who stood flanked by two tall young men. One was carrying a sleeping newborn in a front pack. The other had a receding hairline and an Adam's apple like a swallowed anvil. The patrons here were mostly graduate students, some as old as forty, but their faces were so unmarked as to seem hardly human. Faculty members tended to stay young too, she'd noticed--perhaps it was the sea of youth washing over them year after year. And when they did begin to show age the effect was often stagy and unconvincing, as though they'd achieved it by powdering their hair and applying grease pencil to the lines around their mouths.
Ruth stole a glance at Ben, who was listening to the student with unfeigned interest. How the student glowed in the light of his attention. Or perhaps that was just his youth, just his health. Ben had turned sixty a few weeks ago, but he was still broad in the shoulder and trim at the waist. Standing in shadow he could almost pass for a gr

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Excerpted from It Will Come to Me: A Novel by Emily Fox Gordon
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