In the Fogg Museum on the campus of Harvard University, Toni Isaacs is going toe-to-toe with one of the bad guys.
This is near the end of “The Student Body,” a new suspense novel about a prostitution ring and other skullduggery at Harvard, written by four 1986 graduates of the university. It is a novel about blackmail, casual sex, drugs, an orgy, betrayal, sex for hire, fraud, more sex, a murder, and millions of dollars in stock market profits.
But at issue, at this moment, between Isaacs and the bad guy –a university administrator — is Harvard itself.
As they stand before a wall of abstract paintings, the administrator pleads with Isaacs to forget all that she’s discovered and protect the university’s reputation — protect “the dream of Harvard” as a temple of learning and knowledge.
To which she scoffs: “This isn’t the center of the universe. It’s just a pretty good place to go to college.”
Well, no. Harvard isn’t just a pretty good place to go to college. If it were, “The Student Body” would never have been written. Or, if written, would never have been published.
Not that it’s a bad book. Its publisher, Villard, calls it an erotic thriller, which is another way of saying trashy novel — which is another way of saying it could sell millions. It’s a page-turner, a fine book for the beach or a long airplane ride. Its sex scenes titillate. It features a feisty heroine. It holds your interest. At 354 pages, it’s not too long.
The heroine in “The Student Body” is Isaacs, an aspiring black reporter for the Harvard Crimson who spends the book trying to get to the bottom of a nefarious scheme that seems to have compromised almost everyone she meets.
But the book’s central character is really Harvard itself: Harvard, the most famous, the most heavily endowed and, in the public mind, at least, the best university in the United States. It’s Harvard, proving ground for the country’s best and brightest, that sets the book apart — Harvard and what the book’s four authors say about the university and about life there.
The story they tell is surprising.
Their Harvard isn’t the Harvard of privilege and position. It’s a Harvard of outsiders. A Harvard of scholarship students, a Harvard of many colors and many cultures. The characters in “The Student Body” aren’t following in Daddy’s or Grandpa’s footsteps in attending the university; they’re breaking new ground. And everyone’s carrying the heavy baggage that comes with the name Harvard.
Consider Consuelo Santana, called Chelo, a premed Latina student who grew up in the poverty of East L.A.:
“At Southgate High, Chelo had been a big star, the school’s first student to go to Harvard — or any elite private university, for that matter. The attendance office still displayed a framed photo with a copper plaque that read: `Consuelo Santana: Student of the Year & Harvard University Acceptee.’ . . . (Now, at Harvard) it was no longer possible for Chelo to get the highest grade on every test. No matter how hard she worked, someone always scored higher. She wasn’t going to solve a big mystery with her scientific brilliance; she’d be lucky if she got into a third-rate medical school. A wave of sadness slowly engulfed her.”
`Let’s write a book!’
The four authors of “The Student Body” — writing as Jane Harvard — didn’t set out to produce a thriller. Sure, they hoped to create a best seller, one that would bring them fame and maybe a little money. But their aim was to write a coming-of-age novel. They wanted to tell the story of their time at Harvard.
At the beginning, it was almost a lark. (Picture Mickey Rooney saying to Judy Garland, “Hey, let’s put on a show!”) But these were four Harvard grads, and their idea of relaxing is — well, let’s say work and accomplishment is never far from their minds.
So it was that, in March 1992, when they decided to get together for a weeklong vacation, they spent the time trying to write a novel about Harvard — cranking out a detailed outline and 100 pages of text, much of which actually ended up in the book.
They met outside Chicago, in Libertyville at the summer cabin owned by Bennett Singer’s parents. (Singer, now 34, grew up in Highland Park and currently works as executive editor of Time magazine’s education program.)
The idea for doing the book came from Michael Francisco Melcher, the only one of the four who was not a writer — and the one who seriously thought a relatively complete book could be written in a week. He and Faith Adiele, best friends through their college years and beyond, had always joked about writing a novel together. (Melcher, now 34, is a New York city lawyer; Adiele, 35, is an English professor at Framingham State College outside Boston.)
“For me,” says Adiele, “it was the opportunity to get together with my closest friends during vacation — which I would be doing anyway. It was a great way to work through our issues. It was a great way to purge that (Harvard) experience.”
Julia Sullivan, the fourth member of the quartet and one of Adiele’s freshman-year roommates, came up with the idea of building the plot around a prostitution ring involving Harvard students, like the real-life one discovered in 1986 at another Ivy League school, Brown University. (Sullivan, 33, is director of communications at Cambridge College and author of two unpublished novels of her own.)
Aiming high
At first, the four toyed with the idea of carrying out a literary hoax like the one perpetrated in 1969 with “Naked Came the Stranger,” a truly trashy novel about sex in suburbia, supposedly written by Penelope Ashe, a Long Island housewife. In fact, it turned out to have been produced by 25 Newsday newspaper writers and editors, each trying to outdo the other in bad writing.
Then there was “Naked Came the Manatee,” a serialized book published in the Miami Herald’s Tropic magazine in 1995 and 1996 with 13 different writers, each trying to bend and twist the plot to idiosyncratic extremes.
But neither “Naked” book was a model for the four friends. They had higher aspirations. “We actually did want to write a good book,” says Melcher.
They wanted to produce a book that didn’t read like it was written by four people. So they made sure that no one person had responsibility for any particular character or for any particular chapter. Adiele might start to draft a chapter, but, when she’d get stuck, Melcher or Sullivan would step in.
On vacations — yes, there were several other working vacations — they had their computer terminals set up next to each other, and, in between times, they communicated via e-mail and conference calls. Singer, who did relatively little of the initial writing, functioned as the group’s editor, carried out research and made business contacts with agents and publishers.
Finally, they completed the book they wanted to write — a book about close friends from many backgrounds who helped one another struggle through the growing pains of reaching maturity at Harvard. The prostitution ring angle was in there to give the work a commercial hook. They turned it in to their publisher.
And it was kicked back.
There was too much talking and not enough action. Not enough plot. So a heavy rewrite took place. “We cut 250 pages and added 200 pages,” Melcher said.
And — voila! — “The Student Body,” an erotic thriller.
Angst and celebrity
The four friends (who will appear at Printworks Ltd. in Chicago on May 26 and the Book Stall in Winnetka on May 27) all say the novel is stronger and better because of its more focused plot — because it is more like what suspense novel readers expect.
Besides, it’s still their book.
“It’s the first multicultural thriller,” says Singer, and, from the start, that was a goal of the four friends: to capture the racial, ethnic and lifestyle diversity of Harvard — a diversity so at odds with the university’s WASP history and reputation.
Among the characters are glamorous, hipper-than-thou Van Nguyen, a bisexual Vietnamese refugee; elegant Didi Caron, son of a wealthy Cuban-American publisher in Miami; and Sterling Kwok, the sell-out university administrator from Hong Kong. When a delegation goes to a popular professor to ask him to go to bat for a student under threat of suspension, they include “an intense-looking Korean man” and “a woman who looked and sounded like Eva Braun.” And the student they’re trying to help? He’s Native American.
“We were trying to assure that every person wouldn’t be the stock white character,” says Adiele who, herself, is half-Nigerian and half-Scandinavian. Melcher is part Mexican; Sullivan and Singer are white.
It’s a worthy effort because Harvard, like most other college campuses, is much more ethnically and racially diverse than it ever was. True, the four do go overboard in assigning a distinctly different cultural background to virtually every character. But the effort does add piquancy to the story, and the result is closer to reality than the old image of Harvard as a white bastion.
What also seems close to reality is the ambivalence the characters feel toward Harvard. It may be a great place for learning, but it’s also a great place for angst.
“Harvard has the highest per capita production of stress outside of Wall Street,” says one character. “Students, faculty, administration — you name it. There are more mentally ill people here than you might think, some resting quite comfortably in the seats of power. And that’s not counting the Prozac poppers. From time to time you may hear about newsworthy disasters — suicides and the like. But those exceptional cases obscure the daily freaked-out state of a lot of ordinary Harvard types.”
All four of “The Student Body” authors say they enjoyed their time at Harvard but experienced many stresses and strains. In fact, two of them took a year off in the middle of their time at the university, basically to clear their heads.
“I loved the Harvard experience,” says Melcher. “But it can be a very stressful place. There’s the whole buildup. Everybody tells you that you’ll be famous, that you’ve hit a gold mine. People kind of expect that you’re going to break out into great influence and power and virtue.”
In 1993, one of Melcher’s acquaintances at Harvard, Masako Owada, became the crown princess of Japan. That same year, another classmate, who graduated a year earlier than Melcher and his co-authors, got his own late-night show on NBC: Conan O’Brien.
“The Student Body” may not get its four authors on the cover of People magazine. They realize that. But they’re proud of their work.
“I don’t know how much money it’ll make,” says Melcher. “But it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”
