Fictional Harvard

In the absence of actual post-graduate plans, a couple of my roommates and I plan to spend the summer writing a lucrative and trashy thriller. It is going to be—in the words of one of my collaborators—“like ‘Desperate Housewives’ meets The Da Vinci Code.” It will be set, of course, at Harvard.

My roommates’ and my attempt to capitalize on the Harvard mystique is hardly original. You could probably trace the phenomenon back to boys’ books of the ’teens and ’twenties, such as Fuller at Harvard, but it certainly reached its flowering in Erich Segal’s shamelessly treacly Love Story. The fact that such a conventional story of improbable cross-class love achieved widespread popularity is attributable in large part to its setting.

And—most pertinently for us—in recent thrillers, “Harvard” functions as convenient shorthand for “skeptic” and “snob.” Robert Langdon, hero of The Da Vinci Code, is a “Harvard symbologist.” NBC’s forthcoming miniseries based on the Book of Revelation (and catchily entitled Revelations—I can’t wait!) features a skeptical Harvard astrophysicist, Professor Richard Massey. All of this augurs well, we feel, for the success of our novel: America is plainly interested in Harvard.

Because my roommates and I are fundamentally kind of lazy (hence, I suppose, the lack of post-graduate plans), we intend to base our central characters on ourselves and on people we know. While brainstorming over drinks, though, we realized that to conform to popular conceptions of Harvardians—and we are unabashedly aiming for a mass market with our book—our hero-students would have to be a lot more ostentatiously smart and accomplished than we are. It would be useful, for instance, if they knew Latin, and also kung fu. These are not accomplishments any of us possess. The more self-consciously Harvard we made our characters, the farther they departed from us and from people we knew.

In some senses, of course, the departure made sense. We do not intend our shoddily-written book, which bears the working title The Fourth Lie (rejected prospective titles include Veritass), to be strong on character development, and quickly-sketched caricatures of charismatic eggheads are a handy way to make room for the plot—which will, incidentally, be really, really gripping.

But in another sense the departures were disheartening. Perhaps some undergraduates—those of us who went to prep schools, those of us who have family members who came here, those who were never hopeless naïfs—never believed in a mythologized Harvard peopled by Charles-sculling geniuses. But for the rest of us, “Harvard” once meant a remote and rarefied place, full of extraordinary people.

Disillusionment was inevitable, although in my case very slow. Even after uninspired lectures, I remained awed by professors’ erudition. Even after excruciating section discussions, I remained in awe of upperclassmen (goodness! they could reference habermas! And foucault!), and anxious about my own spotty secondary education.

It has taken me four years to realize something very basic about Harvard students: we’re more-or-less normal. We may be, as a group, a little better-read and a little more socially awkward than college students elsewhere—but, pace popular conceptions of us, we aren’t really very remarkable. The disconnect between imagined Harvard and actual Harvard is uncomfortable even for those who know us best: my brother and my father, for instance, call me “Harvard” (as in, “Nice job, Harvard!”) only when I do something particularly stupid.

This prosaic reality, though, doesn’t translate very well into fiction—especially fast-moving fiction. Hence Professors Langdon and Massey—and hence, eventually, my roommates’ and my Latin verb-declining, kung fu-fighting heroes. There is something strange about propagating a myth that you no longer believe in, especially when it’s more or less about you. But if there’s one thing that Miracle on 34th Street—and, come to think of it, the lukewarm reviews for Ross Douthat’s debut tome—have taught us, it is that nobody likes a stickler for the truth. There is no real harm, I suppose, in capitalizing on the myth of the supernaturally brilliant and accomplished Harvardian—so long as we don’t buy into it ourselves.

Phoebe Kosman ’05, a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.