Melissa Holbrook Pierson
Is the phrase “a farce set in art school” redundant? Cate Dicharry’s first novel takes that view, and while this position could easily be insufferable as well as unnecessary—hitting the broad side of a barn is not exactly a daring challenge—she makes it an unvarnished delight. This is an especially wise authorial move given how well-worked a genre the campus novel is—and how brave or even foolhardy it is to follow the likes of Kingsley Amis, Mary McCarthy, and Randall Jarrell. Yet contrary to the opinion of some (“Last rites for the campus novel”), the genre is not over, or It started with the busted tie-rods of a Humvee. It continued with the ill-advised order to split an Army Ranger platoon as the Afghan night was coming on. And it finished, on April 22, 2004, with the death by friendly fire of an exemplary young American. But there it did not really end, because of who this fine man happened to be — Pat Tillman, promising NFL star — and because a virtuosic author decided to write a political firecracker of a book about the “cynical cover-up sanctioned at the highest levels of government” that ensued after his death.