“The very things that made me love Harvard — its seductiveness, its limitlessness — also made it a very convincing villain,” Cooper writes in “We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence,” her book, 10 years in the making, about the case at the heart of the rumor. “Harvard felt omnipotent.”
At 500 pages, “We Keep the Dead Close” — which will be published by Grand Central on Nov. 10 trailing superlatives from the high-profile authors Ron Chernow, Stacy Schiff and Patrick Radden Keefe — is a true-crime procedural and a record of its author’s all-consuming obsession, unfolding in what can seem like real time. But it is also, more unusually, a young woman’s reckoning with an institution whose mythic reputation belies unsavory secrets.
My initial plan was to skip all of the major key numbers, but that proved impossible, despite myself, once I stumbled through the opening bars of the first invention in C major. The music was absurdly simple: just a few notes from the C major scale up and down, then a leap and a trill—an ornament consisting of the rapid alternation between two notes.
It was all so logical: figure out what key you are in, noodle around in the scale until you find something reasonably catchy, modulate to related keys now and then according to some straightforward rules, and return home.
Many at the margins proofread their bodies, clipping what they think will not be accepted—often splintering their very ideas of self. This fear of being rejected, of getting caught, haunts the novel and is most palpable in Ivy’s relationship with Gideon. Yang takes a character who is a confessed thief from the first page, and etches her with qualities that turn her into a complex, layered, and unpredictable character.
This is a high-risk move: it takes a story about not fitting in and turns it into a sort of freak show – even though it’s hinted that the Grand Guignol grotesqueries of these scenes aren’t really happening. But whatever Earthlings is, whatever planet it comes from, it’s a tale of quiet desperation to make your brain fizz.
Her title, Scoff, plays on two meanings, the first being to chow down and fill your boots with whatever good things come your way, while the second means to mock or negate another person’s way of life – their taste, in other words. In Vogler’s rich survey these two meanings weave around each other as she offers a series of bite-sized chunks on the social status of everything from gingerbread to veal, fish and chips to quince.
Once a month
when the moon loses everything,
Don Max takes a chair
to the edge of the sea.