Kit Oliver

Let me preface this review by saying that if you’ve never been to graduate school, you don’t know anyone who’s ever been to graduate school, you’ve never been a teacher and you give not a fig about verisimilitude in your fiction, you will probably not care one whit about what I’ve got to say here. That’s fine! Scroll right on by.

Because I myself like a good deployment of the fake dating trope—that’s what got me to pick the book up—and if The Place Between had had a show more different backdrop, or if I’d never completed a PhD, I may well have liked this book just fine. The main character, Ned, is bi, he’s struggling with his sense of confidence in his work, and he’s got a small daughter who at least sounds like an actual child and not like a 23-year-old masquerading as one. There are some issues—perhaps most significantly the fact that I never entirely bought Henry as a person (he’s like if Darcy and Spock had a hot, multilingual, American-but-with-an-implausible Swiss-accent baby, but with a lot of dropped character threads), though most annoyingly the fact that far too many of the minor characters were prone to being the fic/romance novel cliche of having absolutely no personal boundaries and a prurient and unlikely degree of interest in their friend’s/colleague’s/student’s love life. (If a friend of mine, let alone a faculty member in the department where I'm a student, took my phone from me and, over my protests, got someone else to tell her the pass code so that she could look at my private photos? "Obnoxious bully" is the warmest thing I'd think of her.)

But oh man, if the author has ever been to graduate school? I will eat not just one hat, but all of the hats that I own.

This is apparent in a host of small details (grad students don’t sit mid-terms; no one gives a shit about your GPA; a 700-page dissertation in sociology?; it takes at least a couple of months and a lot of paperwork to schedule a defence, apply for graduation, and deposit the final dissertation, not a single week; that’s not what a defence is like; teaching a course requires a lot of time to plan, to grade, to deal with so much email; you don’t assign a book that your institutional library doesn’t own and that you haven’t put on course reserve, Ned) but even more egregiously in the basic premise of the book.

Said premise is as follows: Ned’s in the final stages of his dissertation, a qualitative study of first-generation college students. Right as his last semester begins, his advisor, Chris, tells him that he’s got to turn it into a quantitative study for him to have a chance of getting a job. The problem is that Ned is terrible at statistics, so Chris tells him that he’s going to put a junior faculty member, Henry, on his committee, to help him out with the revisions, which need to be done by October. Ned has disliked Henry ever since he took a class from him and almost failed a midterm (see above).

(Is it possible to have a doctoral advisor who's so spectacularly shitty that, in your last semester, they will turn to you and say you need to go back through the entire dissertation and add "more analysis"? Sure! I mean, I have the grad school-related trauma to prove that you can have an awful, emotionally traumatic grad school experience! But there are systems in place to try to stop this kind of bullshit from happening.)

("A couple of weeks of revisions and then you can defend your dissertation in early October." This reduced me to stuttering and waving my hands around, a la Madeline Kahn in Clue.)

At the same time, Chris, who is also the department chair, decides to implement a plan to improve the department's national rankings, student recruitment, graduation placements and research initiatives by mandating a strict 9-5, M-F work schedule, with people locked out of the building and barred from accessing work saved to the cloud at the weekends.

”We're talking hobbies, we're talking time with family, we're talking weekends away from the office, nights without computers, evenings with friends, all of it.”

Now, is work-life balance an almost unheard-of concept in academia, even outsde of the hell year that is 2020? Absolutely! Is it possible that a senior, white male tenured faculty member would come up with an "initiative" that hairbrained and inadvertently punitive? Oh, sure! But this particular flavour of hairbrainedness seems far more likely to come, not from an academic, but from a management consultant with no academic experience (since national rankings, etc, pay literally no attention to the kinds of issues described here, and since this kind of "initiative" is going to penalise any tenure-track faculty with small children, caretaking responsibilities, etc, who have to produce a certain amount of scholarship of a certain quality in a set number of years in order to keep their jobs. And yet no one else objects to this? Not one person? In academia, where people are more prone to stubborn resistance over the tiniest things than a toddler is about putting on a jacket before going outside?)

Anyway, in order to hide the fact that they’re working together on the weekends, and to allow Ned access to the department’s server via Henry’s VPN, Ned and Henry decide to pretend to date.

To reiterate: the guy he's going to be fake dating to get favour from the department chair is on his committee and/or is at least working with him in an advisory capacity (the framing of it all is vague and somewhat contradictory). I cannot stress how wrong this is. Look, if your kink is teacher/student or other form of innately unequal power dynamic, have at it. I'm not going to join you in it, but you do you, bake your own beautiful cake. However, if you write a book in which everyone around this couple is all "uWu we've been shipping you for ages" rather than "Uh, so this is entirely unethical and not actually the kind of thing you can get away with just by filling out a relationship disclosure form?", I'm going to side-eye the shit out of it.

("Did you know about the form?" Abbot's head shakes. "I didn't."

Me: He's been employed at a university for a decade and he doesn't know this?
Academic Friend: THEY MAKE US DO TRAININGS.)

Because look: if your department chair/dissertation advisor tells you that you and a faculty member would be cute together? That's sexual harassment. If he's willing to give you back network access if you start dating? If you start dating when he's apparently known that the tenure-track faculty person had a thing for the grad student back when the grad student was officially enrolled in a class of his? That's 100% harassment.

("Lee's mouth drops open, a smile at the corner of her lips. "Charles Henry Abbot, did you have a crush on your student?"" EVERYONE'S GETTING FIRED.)

And as part of this whole “initiative”, Chris somehow gets funding (from… somewhere?) to pay for the faculty to do recreational activities together. How? How are they getting money for the whole department to go to a fucking Red Sox game in Boston? I got an email earlier this semester asking me to rank office supplies in order of preference because my institution has to make tough decisions about whether to like, buy staples or paperclips, and I’m supposed to buy that there's some private (I think?) R2 (maybe) university somewhere in Maine that's got the money to send its faculty off on weekend recreational jaunts and is paying them well enough that a junior associate professor can afford an Audi sportscar and a restored, single-family Victorian row house.

…. ahahahaha. Does Henry have a trust fund?

(Unless you are a nationally famous, tenured professor at an Ivy you are not making bank, and even then you will be making far below what you could make in a non-academic job with similar qualifications.)

All of which, and more, underscores the fact that the fictional university that Ned attends doesn't feel like an R1 university at all—maybe an R2, if I'm being generous (don't start a doctoral program at an R2 if you have any aspirations of an academic job in the humanities or social sciences, sorry), but honestly it reads more like the author attended a SLAC and drew on her experiences of that and then bolted an imagined grad programme onto the side. A teaching-focused liberal arts college provides a very different experience to a research-oriented R1, which is why reading a description of this place as a PhD granting institution where the foremost job of the faculty is

to teach and support students and their research happens outside of that. It's how Chris runs his department and how the deans run the college.

made me laugh hollowly.

("You're fucking your professor, a voice in his head keeps repeating." YES. JAIL FOR EVERYONE FOR TEN THOUSAND YEARS. )

I have served on multiple academic hiring committees now, for exactly the kind of assistant professor jobs that Ned is presumably applying to. Do you know how much red tape is involved? Do you? Do you know the kind of rigid calendar cycle according to which academic jobs are advertised, interviewed for, and offered? Henry introduces Ned to a guy at a conference who is like oh, I remember your application, let's chat about it now (this is not kosher per employment law!) and helps to finagle Ned an interview (which takes place in... October? Or something. Not January or February, no sir) and somehow this is good as opposed to an example of the Old Boy upperclass white dude nepotism network at play.

I could keep going, but I’m tired and you get the point by now. This is like if I said, I'm going to write a novel about surgeons who fall in love based on what I remember from watching a couple of episodes of Grey's Anatomy, or something about lawyers from my vague memories of the first couple of seasons of Suits. (Gosh, Jessica Pearson. Remember her? The unparalleled redeeming aspect of that whole pile of nonsense.)

If you’re going to the effort of writing an entire book set in a field you don’t know much about, it maybe is a good and obvious idea to go talk to someone who’s in that field? Or to get them to read and comment on a draft for viability?

But what do I know about common sense: I’m writing this when I should be grading. show less

“Never f*cked anyone who gave me a C, you know,” he says. He can actually see Abbot’s sigh in the flare of his ribs. “Was I not clear about the talking?”

What you'll get:
Hot for teacher
Fake dating
Single dad
Enemies to lovers
Grad School x Professor
Gay and bisexual rep

Setting: Maine and Massachusetts

Ned has one semester left in his doctorate program before he can move home where his daughter is when his advisor tells him it's not done and he needs to rework it. That's fine. What wasn't show more fine was that everyone is terrible and keep sabotaging him. The advisor decides that people in academia need better work/life balance (HA! Never heard of her.) and cuts off their access to the university server after 9-5 hours. This unfortunately includes Ned because he's teaching a class even though he's a student himself. He can get access again if he manages to get the biggest loner in the department to socialize so now they're fake dating.

Professors treat him as a peer and completely disregard him as a student which is not to his benefit. He doesn't advocate for himself or his own needs near enough and I just got so mad at everyone. Abbot was ok - he had a crush on Ned for years and it got outed on a work trip when other professors were teasing him. But wasn't ok was that he was on Ned's dissertation committee and that seemed like a conflict of interest. They managed to fall in love without really ever having a conversation with any depth whatsoever.

All of that was what it was but Ned was clearly dealing with untreated depression but because he was friendly, everyone assumed he was doing great. They kept putting him in uncomfortable situations because they found it fun when Ned was drowning. If he was doing great, this could have been really fun. But when the main character says he's numb all the time, lonely, and is tearing up from rage-stress, he's not the one to tease right now. show less

4 stars.
Well, I was also not expecting this one. An author with only a couple of books out? What's that going to look like? Tight, well written, and amusing, apparently. And even though it was in third person present tense (I dislike present tense, and third person present tense even more) I could mostly forget about it and be immersed in the story.

This was not what I expected it to be at all.

Sebastian kind of ghosts his childhood-best-friend-turned-boyfriend a few weeks after he gets called up to play professional hockey. Gil is confused but ultimately moves on while thinking of him often as time goes on. They run into each other on a trip back home and it is AWKWARD. Then, to make things worse, they end up realizing they will be new to the same team. Gil as a player and Sebastian as an assistant coach. Turns out, Sebastian has been show more pissed at Gil all this time too.

I do not understand why Sebastian running off and getting married and having a child was the big secret that it was. These two are terrible communicators. show less