My Education by Susan Choi

I'd like to say that I defied gravity as often as feeling its snare, but my efforts were more likely spent clinging on with white knuckles not to be dislodged.  Still, that was my heroism--my tenacious fidelity to her, though it was based on a grave misconception.  I thought desire was duty.  No trial could not be endured nor impediment smashed in desire's holy service, or so I believed, with naive righteousness.  I didn't grasp that desire and duty could rival each other, least of all that they most often do.

I thought I knew where Susan Choi's My Education was headed when the narrator, first-year literature grad student Regina Gottlieb, sets eyes on the professor Nicholas Brodeur.  Brodeur is strikingly handsome, but a reputation for sexual coercion precedes him.  But Regina doesn't tumble headlong into bed with Brodeur--at least, not at first and not the way I was expecting--instead tumbling headlong into bed with Brodeur's wife, first glimpsed pregnant and sailing past the classroom door.  (I think Choi conspires with her editor and cover artist to lay that trap--check out the indeterminate blond head on the pillow on the cover.) The relationship is a tempestuous one: it breaks up the professorial couples' marriage, or, as Brodeur's wife Martha would have Regina believe, coincides with the dissolution of it.  For Regina, it's like the appearance of a comet: burning, destructive, and since it's her first and only relationship with a woman, rare.  When it finally falls apart, as the older Martha has always insisted that it must, it drives Regina from academia and into existential crisis that only time, figured here as a fifteen-year gap in the narrative, can cure.

I read a lot of Munro in Choi's prose.  Like Munro, Choi has a love for the abstract noun; words like desire and duty drive the conflict inside Regina.  But Choi trades Munro's kitchen-vocabulary for the ergot of academia: impediment, demimonde, tutelage, quotidian.  I was a little annoyed by it until I realized that of course those are the kind of words that Regina, anxious to seem like she belongs in the jargon-heavy world of humanities grad school, would use.  (I am still annoyed by the frequency of adverbs!)  She drops them as pointedly as she drops "Djuna Barnes" and "Andre Gide."  And it's this person--the anxious academic--that unravels twice, first in what seems to be the primal heat of love/lust, and then in heartbreak.

Like lots of passionate relationships, Regina and Martha's seems to consist mostly of fighting.  The sex is torrid, but the width between their worldviews proves too great to overcome.  Regina can't conceive of a duty to anything besides love--see how often she demands that Martha tell her she loves her--but Martha has a newborn son, and even an ex-husband to whom she owes a great deal.  Martha understands Regina's feelings but cannot meet her in them.  Their relationship ends up bitter and toxic; maybe it's because I can't empathize with the intensity of the same-sex attraction, but I was turned off by how sour it became.  And maybe it's because I'm not in my twenties anymore, but I was more impressed by the novel's final third, which finds a wiser, more mature Regina:

Flying west, I became middle-aged.  All the cowardly, derisive ideas I had somehow absorbed in my youth of what middle age meant fell away, as can sometimes occur to cliches for mysterious reasons.  The poor hunchbacked jargon stepped out of its clothes and stood uprightly naked and plain.  It meant just what it said, nothing else.  It wasn't a need for face cream or an interest in stocks or conservatism.  It meant that one now touched both ends: that is what middle is.  Middle age only meant that the least reconcilable times of one's life would in fact coexist until death.  My youth--the demands of my young, able body, and my young understanding, whether able or not--was not going to shrink in perspective while allowing superior ripeness to gently replace it.  My youth was not the most stubborn, peremptory part of myself.  In my most relaxed moments, it governed my being.  It pricked up its ears at the banter of eighteen-year olds on the street.  It frankly examined their bodies.  It did not know its place: that my youth governed me with such ease didn't mean I was young.  It meant I was divided, as if housing a stowaway soul, rife with itches and yens which demanded a stern vigilance.

The end of My Education pulls a kind of switch that Ishiguro would be proud of.  It undermines Regina's sense of the specialness of her relationship with Martha, but it also resonates with a larger wisdom about what love is, and desire, and duty.  I ended up enjoying it more than I expected, and maybe my exasperation with the young Regina is meant to coincide with the older Regina's exasperation with her younger self.

One final note: Why exactly are we told that Brodeur is known as a sexual harasser, when he turns out not to be?  That choice is mirrored in the end: Regina's friend Dutra, who plays a central role in her affair with Martha, is maliciously accused of sexual assault by his hospital bosses, who want to push him out.  Two dots make a line, and it's hard to shake the impression that Choi is especially suspicious of accusations like that, which makes it an especially strange read in the #metoo era.  And that reading lines up with the well-meaning comic jabs it takes at the university world in general, like the cadre of students who taunt a professor with the name of Joseph Conrad, meant as a stand-in for literary colonialism and racism, but whom none of the protestors, including Regina, have ever read.  (Choi also drops some pretty funny fake class titles, like "Aesthetic/Prosthetic," which is really being taught somewhere, I'm sure.)  I think Choi means to suggest that the narratives we used to think about sex are also reductive, but it still seems weird.