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Spiegel and Grau
March 2009
On Sale: March 10, 2009
288 pages ISBN: 0385525877 EAN: 9780385525879 Hardcover
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Fiction
A sharply observed comic novel about a writer straining
against the role of faculty wife This first novel from the acclaimed memoirist Emily Fox
Gordon is a tart, intelligent comedy of manners set on the
campus of a large Southern university. It is also a story
about the comforts and grievances of a marriage of
longstanding—about change and continuity and the
possibility of renewal in midlife. Ben Blau is the reluctant chair of the philosophy
department of The Lola Dees Institute, surrounded by a
bestiary of academic innocents and opportunists. His wife
Ruth—a writer whose early literary success never quite
blossomed into a career—nurtures sometimes noisy and
sometimes private rebellions against the conventions of
academic life. Their lives have settled, if not always
comfortably, into a dull ceremonial round of convocations,
committee meetings, and pot-luck dinners. To Ruth it seems
that nothing will ever change. Except that this year a new couple has arrived on campus:
an ethereal, celebrated young memoirist and her husband, an
intellectual jack-of-all-trades and perpetual misfit.
Something about these two throws the staid academic world
of the Lola Dees Institute into comic chaos and revives
Ruth's hopes that she might become once again the writer
she used to be. Emily Fox Gordon's astringent depiction of academic life
and her mature, finely wrought observations about marriage
and relationships make It Will Come to Me is a complete
delight —engaging, wise, superbly written, and very, very
funny.
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