School

Both an exorcism of contemporary academia and a comedic portrait of an artist seeking the means to survive

At once angry and jubilant, Ray Levy’s School is a curse on life in a dying university system and an incantation for transforming the material of one’s academic humbling into a vessel for capacious, creative selfhood.

The novel incorporates a variety of forms, including a dissertation manuscript possessed by the spirit of Marquis de Sade, a lecture on psychoanalysis delivered as stand-up comedy by a dysphoric graduate student, a review of a found-footage horror movie that’s also a YouTube video of a conference presentation on French theory, an interview with an avant-garde filmmaker that’s really an invocation for conjuring your demon brother, and more. The whole functions as a caustic ritual. School overshares and withholds, cites and dÉtournÉs, chants and channels as it invokes the dead fathers of deconstruction for the black mass that occurs painfully and parodically across the pages.

A hand-biting tale, one that chews off the finger instead of kissing the ring, School is a deeply unprofessional book about intellectual professions with reference to endless debt and neoliberalization, coercive seduction rites and fetishizations of authority, and the realization of a life in which you have not lost—and, yes, you deserve the full horizon of possibility.