It’s no secret that academia is on the blink; Canadian author Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, which is equal parts satire, dystopia and exposé, tells the story of all that’s wrong, glitchy and broken. Set across Sri Lanka, the United States and Italy, it centres on a cast of students, parents and professors, and their dealings with a common antagonist: the university.
The first character we meet is Sri Lankan teen Devi, who is set on obtaining offers from “Ochpys” – her acronym for Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford. To help her realise her dream, Devi’s family of modest means – her mother, father, maternal grandmother and two brothers – hire themselves out as mourners at the funerals of the wealthy. Most of this money goes towards paying Johannes, her tutor on WhatsApp who, unbeknown to Devi, is a hard-up Indian student at Arcadia Tech, an undistinguished university in the US. Meanwhile, Jack, a statistician at the same institution, has taken on an additional teaching load to meet the fees of the elite college his daughter Katrina attends in New England. Soon he catches on to a grade-fixing scheme aimed at flailing international students, run by his teaching assistant Allard Hamburger. Jack is left in disbelief when, to buy his silence, the university puts him on paid administrative leave instead of launching an inquiry into a scandal that has left one student dead by suicide.
Boyagoda keeps the narrative charged with drama through an ever-evolving gallery of characters and their never-ending problems: yet-to-be-Dr Allard, who suffers from daddy issues and intends to endow a research chair at the Ivy League school where his long-absent father Martin teaches astronomy; his all-but-PhD mother Patricia, who had been teaching research methods to undergraduates until she was replaced by a chatbot named Puck; Katrina and her roommate Cham, a Sri Lankan refugee raised in Rome. The best of friends from the moment they met and shared their stories – Cham’s separation from her family and adoption by the Sri Lankan ambassador; Katrina’s mother laid low by breast cancer – the two are now quietly feuding. This is partly because they are unwelcome on university premises, thanks to Cham, whose idea it was that they sabotage a protest version of the 14th-century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in a bid to be radical on their own terms. By sticking to the original script instead of observing a sit-in like the rest of the cast, they have partaken in 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”.
A campus novel of the present moment, Lords of Serendipity is animated by the upheavals reshaping American universities and the wider world: the pressures put on higher education by the Trump administration, the steady erosion of the humanities, Israel’s devastation of Gaza, as well as the threat of AI and the fact that “everything with substance and history, with texture and nuance, with seriousness, gravitas, was being replaced with flatness and shine and more flatness and shine”. Boyagoda has no end of things to say about “the corruption upon corruption upon corruption of the university”, its growing subordination to corporate interests, what is lost in that process, and how for many students from the global south a western education may not be “a lifestyle thing, or an experience” but an expensive pathway to immigration.
Part of what makes this book propulsive as well as engaging and thought-provoking beyond its topical significance is Boyagoda’s voice, which is intellectually agile without being self-congratulatory, and incisive without squandering its whimsy and impishness. Boyagoda, who is a professor of English at the University of Toronto, has both good and bad jokes, and he often wields them at his own expense, poking fun at everything from the interpretive excesses of English literature scholars to the proclivity of humanities folks to cast themselves as the “eternal torture victims of the university”.
Many things happen in this novel – too many to describe here. The most unexpected development concerns the Chinese takeover of a university in the Sri Lankan city of Kurunegala, which is renamed Serendipity in a grim and ironic evocation of the island’s colonial past (“Serendib,” we are told, “was the original name of Sri Lanka itself, when Europeans and Chinese explorers first found it and were so unexpectedly happy and amazed by their discovery”). The university becomes the new base for Martin’s work on colliding stars, after he abruptly loses his research chair at his home institution. Jack, who has been persuaded to join this new venture, will find himself once again at the centre of a scandal that puts his integrity to the test.
Meanwhile, after barely pulling through a series of dispiriting setbacks, Devi approaches Jack in the hope of turning her luck around. That we live in an unequal but interconnected world is hardly a revelation; in this tragicomic tale, full of crooks and strivers, opportunists, dreamers and mercurial patrons, Boyagoda’s genius lies in humanising this entanglement, and revealing its contradictions.
• Lords of Serendipity by Randy Boyagoda is published by Abacus (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
