Vol. 1, Number 3	Fall 1998 issue

 

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A year ago, I walked through Phelps Gate for the first time and thought I had entered the most exciting educational institution imaginable. This year, I return sadder but wiser. Now I am aware of another, better world that can never be mine. Days spent in witty conversation, absorbing the multifaceted humor of those around me. Nights engaged in sexual conquest, a never-ending experimentation with wild and fantastic combinations and positions that would make Anais Nin blush. I look at the relative dullness of my life now, and I weep. I could have gone to Harvard.

As a youthful and unprepared high school senior, I could not have been expected to know what I was missing. After all, I had not yet read the lush and rather sticky story of Cambridge life offered up by four Harvard graduates under the pseudonym Jane Harvard in the new novel The Student Body.

Our intrepid heroine, Toni Isaacs, is a reporter for the Harvard Crimson with the chance to break open a prostitution ring involving students at the University, and in the process star in a number of excruciatingly safe sex scenes. This is Boogie Nights for Ivy League fetishists, without the ample charms of Marky Mark. But if this book were only about engorged Crimson manhood, it wouldn't be half the inspiring work of literature that it is. Its other charms are considerable, and they might yet keep Bill Bennett from turning his righteous wrath towards the Gomorrah on the Charles. Closer examination reveals the moral subtext beneath the sweaty sheets. Toni and her friends have lessons to teach us all:

• Stay in school. Toni is continually agonizing over whether or not to toe the line set by the administration. On the one hand, she could expose a major conspiracy to test drugs on human beings, save a number of girls from lives of prostitution, become a media celebrity and an accomplished journalist in one stroke, and possibly assist in the arrest of a murderer. On the other hand, if she does so, there's a chance she might be expelled. From Harvard. And then would she do?

• Choose your friends carefully. The cardinal rule: the less suntan lotion applied, the better. With almost no exceptions, the bad guys (and girls) are Caucasians, while the decent, hardworking folks are everybody else. Out of the dozens of white people in the novel, the two "good" guys are a crack dealer that feels really sorry about it and a paranoid schizophrenic who fakes his own death. And the only token evil member of a minority may have sex with teenage prostitutes, but gosh darn it, he tells Toni to do the right thing, and in the end, she respects him. Since any reader can easily tell which side a character is on by checking skin color, said reader is spared the necessity of trying to understand the characters beneath the rather plastic dialogue, and can immediately proceed to the heavy breathing.

• It never hurts to advertise. Spelling out a message explicitly is the best way to communicate. For example, the authors of this book want their readers to know that it is set at Harvard University. So they say that it is. Then they say it again. The word "Harvard" appears twenty-one times in the first fifteen pages. This could be part of setting up Harvard as a visceral presence. It might even be an ambitious attempt to make Harvard a character in its own right. It's about as believable as the rest of the characters.

• Clean up after yourself. Time and again the incredibly powerful conspiracy of bad rich dudes fools Toni into participating in illegal activity, brings the police force down on her, and then drops a big crack vial or videotape of a professor in flagrante delicto in front of her so that she doesn't lose interest. The reader is forced to conclude that an entire mob of Harvard-educated businessmen and trustees really has no concept of the importance of evidence in conducting an investigation. Perhaps they failed to consult their law firm.

• People ought to earn their place. Northeastern girls who work as strippers to get through college... Wellesley girls on the prowl for husbands to support them... MIT geeks with no social skills... almost every other area college gets savaged by the authors. Yet these specimens of mental inferiority still keep showing up at party after party, leaving our heroine with no choice but to leave in disgust and immediately find a soft-core scene to wander into.

• All men are crazy lunatic sex fiends. Or just plain crazy. I suppose everyone has to be right some of the time.

While the Cambridge of The Student Body throbs with nightlife, a not-so-dirty secret lies behind the novel. The sad truth is that the events of the novel are purely fictional, based on a scandal that broke at Brown University in 1986. It was a bunch of Brown girls who were spreading their, uh, loving all over town. The tawdry truth is that Harvard students' favorite kind of stimulation is probably still caffeine pills, and odds are that Ron Jeremy won't be parking his car in Harvard Yard anytime soon. Still, the lessons I learned from this modern band of Aesops will serve me well in the immediate future.

Anyone up for a road trip to Providence?