“Flatness and shine.” You see it in cars, in logos, in corporate fonts, in certain types of music and books, in every AI flyer and ad, in buildings. Ours is a century of sameness, of a flattening out of personality, culture, and art. The world is viewed, connected, compared, and mimetically influenced on such a mass scale that in New York or Florida or California I will find a carbon copy of the apartment complex down the street from me in Duluth, Minnesota. When the goal is sameness, not an expression of local culture, art, or beauty, what is the logical approach? Flatness and shine. Sleek lines, crisp edges, bright floors and ceilings, glinting windows and chrome. A clean, sharp, endlessly repeating exterior to conceal whatever might lie within.
This phrase, “flatness and shine,” repeats throughout Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, Lords of Serendipity. While those words could be applied to many specific things in modern life, in Boyagoda’s novel, they most directly describe two universities, one in the United States and one in Sri Lanka, that are far away from Newman’s idea of the university:
Everything with substance and history, with texture and nuance, with seriousness, gravitas, was being replaced with flatness and shine and more flatness and shine. The university had become all flatness and shine.
The American university where much of the novel’s action takes place, called Haven—the name of which is just one of Boyagoda’s many satiric ironies—features “chapels being turned into wellness centers; library stacks being eliminated to make space for meditation zones, test kitchens, flex spaces.” Perhaps more strikingly, the university in Sri Lanka—renamed Serendipity after its Chinese-funded reinvention—consists of brand new “flat and shiny” and literally empty buildings next to the run-down but beautiful Sri Lankan architecture, “lime white, pink, yellow, and baby blue,” “flanked in flowering bushes,” with “fountains in front of residence halls.” The contrast between these buildings—the old and crumbling yet beautiful next to the new, bright, clean, and lifeless—conveys the hollowness of the modern university.
There is a certain violation of sacramentality at work in the novel’s characters and setting—outward signs at complete odds with the invisible realities under the surface.
In addition to being a novelist and critic, Boyagoda is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and the newly-appointed director of its Jackman Humanities Institute, bringing plenty of university experience and knowledge to this novel. And though it is a thoroughly “campus novel,” with characters’ lives and actions revolving around university applications, studies, and professorships, much of the story takes place away from the classroom or campus itself. Instead, it is a novel of university politics and bureaucracy, identity politics, integrity and corruption and virtue signaling in academics, economic and moral bankruptcy in the university system, the human desire for something, something big, to go our way, and the flatness and shine with which we attempt to cover it all up.
This “flatness and shine” applies in Boyagoda’s novel even to the modern citizen whose own “hollowness” he attempts to hide beneath a public veneer. One character, Allard, accuses his mother of this hollowness even as his own life is built on dishonesty and an external front that hides his own lack of integrity. Most of the characters in the novel live this duplicity, presenting themselves and their desires one way while internally orchestrating their own Machiavellian purposes.
One example of this is the minor character, Mather, who appears to one of the novel’s protagonists, Katrina, as a college-student version of “flatness and shine”: beautiful, “sharp-edged,” “chiseled,” a “Captain America doll.” Only later in the novel do we see how hollow Mather is and see the damage this lack of correspondence between the external and internal, between the body and the soul, does to Katrina. Although Boyagoda doesn’t state this in outright theological terms, there is a certain violation of sacramentality at work in the novel’s characters and setting—outward signs at complete odds with the invisible realities under the surface. In some characters, we see the consequences of this violation play out. In others, we do not.
One of the novel’s braided plotlines follows an astronomy professor and his work studying black holes. This professor, Martin, is, like Mather, a lot of flatness and shine and deep university corruption. Martin’s specific area of study, though, demonstrates the richness of Boyagoda’s fiction. While each thread of the novel works as part of an interconnected narrative web, they also speak to each other in a deeper thematic unity. Martin studies the creation of black holes and specifically what he claims is an “afterglow” left behind by the colliding stars that create them. The “glow” of the destroyed stars is like the “shine” of the collapsing universities: bright, beautiful—and a mark of destruction. At the novel’s end, Jack, one of the central characters, recognizes this as “the glow of the university. The false glow. The faked glow.”
This false, faked glow, this flatness and shine and the corruption hidden underneath, are the deeply serious heart of what is also a sharp, witty comedy. Boyagoda writes, as he does in his previous novels, with an eye trained toward cultural awareness and satire. The list of specific examples is too long to list, but we see students and professors in (implicitly performative) keffiyahs, chants of “NO KINGS”, N95s, Israeli and Palestinian flags, an AI research bot replacing a library employee, a “Special Circumstances Petition Panel” and “Compassionate Grading Protocol.” “Don’t say her name,” a student says of J. K. Rowling (“I know. Trust me, I won’t,” comes the reply), even as students bring Harry Potter lore into their usurped classroom discussion. Protesting their own performance of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a group of students state in unison:
WE, THE PLAYERS, QUESTION A PLAY THAT PERPETUATES SPECIESIST, SEXIST, RACIST, ABLEIST, AGEIST, AND CHRISTIANIST IDEOLOGIES THAT ARE ALSO DEPLOYED IN SUPPORT OF SETTLER-COLONIAL ZIONIST APARTHEID FASCIST REGIMES. WE, THE PLAYERS, QUESTION A PLAY THAT GENDER-NORMS, SLUT-SHAMES, BODY-SHAMES, AND CELEBRATES STATE VIOLENCE AGAINST PEOPLE OF COLOR.
A weaker novel would perhaps be content to fire shots at academia or simply mock university and identity politics. Though Boyagoda doesn’t pull any punches in his university satire, nor does he fully dismiss the university system and experience. Through several sincere characters and an unironically successful university symposium, he gives us a glimpse of the goods of the university: a true love of books and learning, an opening up of the world in new ways and knowledge, a collegial sharing of discovery. Toward the end of the book, we see two student assistants who are unexpectedly competent, honest, and humble, a slight signpost of hope in the midst of corruption.
Boyagoda also deftly handles two very different worlds throughout the novel. While much of the story follows Americans in different university settings, a portion of the book is about a young Sri Lankan girl who desperately wants to attend an “Ochpys” (“OxfordCambridgeHarvardPrincetonYaleStanford”) university. Boyagoda puts Devi at the center of the cramped world of her family and neighbors in scenes that are both hilarious and utterly heartbreaking. He is a master at moving between the two modes and blending them together in the same scenes and sentences. The interaction between the Western university system and the schools and inhabitants of Sri Lanka exposes deep layers of corruption, exploitation, inequity, and the difficulty in even beginning to rectify these wrongs.
Beneath the satire, the jokes aimed at higher education and identity politics and everything else, Lords of Serendipity highlights the terrible reality of moral compromise, of corruption, of the choice between objectively right action and the immediate or foreseen consequences of our justifications. When it appears that false action, not honesty, will lead to greater good, is it right to hold to a hard moral line? In theory, the answer should be easy and obvious. In practice, it is much harder to discern and act rightly based on those moral principles, no matter how true we know them to be in the abstract. We know and generally accept that the ends don’t justify the means, but how many people, in the heat of decision, reason that this end may justify these means, just this one time . . . ?
Boyagoda doesn’t say easily or obviously what the right decision is at the novel’s end. He shows us Jack’s choice and ends without showing us the consequences. But we have seen the university ecosystem that has resulted from years of just such choices, and we’re free to draw our own conclusions. And we’re left to wonder if the decision Jack has reasoned his way to may just be more flatness and shine covering up the moral corruption beneath.