Retelling Harvard

“Just be friendly. Friendly and aloof,” Penelope O’Shaunessy’s mother advises her as they drive from her hometown in Connecticut to Cambridge. Though Penelope concedes, “OK,” she notes skeptically, “A reconciliation of opposites.”

Penelope is the hapless protagonist of a new novel, “Penelope” by Rebecca M. Harrington ’08, a former Crimson arts editor. The novel follows its gawky namesake through her turbulent freshman year at Harvard.

Members of the Class of 2016 undoubtedly received similarly conflicting advice from their parents only a week or two ago, the most common: study hard and have fun! And all students probably share similar fears about social skills.

If a freshman does not share these basic woes, the student probably a) already knows the particular social stratum into which he/she would like to neatly insert him/herself or b) does not want friends. These opposing categories also tidily define Penelope’s two archetypal roommates. One roommate, Emma, is a melodramatic and manipulative social-climber from New York City who cries over “Pudding stuff.” Her other roommate, Lan from Palo Alto, is a terse genius who socializes mainly with her cat, Raymond, Penelope’s fourth roommate in their Pennypacker triple.

Lodged between her two extreme roommates, Penelope, shiftless and clueless, flits around campus looking for friends and romance. Ultimately, the overly amenable and passive Penelope does not attain the social life she desires. Her problem seems to lie in her bizarre social conduct, described in a telling moment between her and the director of a production of “Caligula.”

The director critiques Penelope’s maneuvering of a marionette during rehearsal, commenting, “It just looks too much like a marionette, Penelope. It’s incredibly stiff. I need it to mimic the fluidities of human motion as much as possible while, at the same time, ironically referencing the artificiality of theatre itself.” The director’s absurd demand seems to manifest Penelope’s central struggle in the novel: how to navigate conflicting and puzzling situations at Harvard. Moreover, the director’s comment reflects the way Harrington herself strays from traditional campus novels that depict college as a transformative experience. In “Penelope,” the absurdity of college experience can be conveyed only through parody.

STRANGELY BLANK

Neither Penelope the character nor “Penelope” the novel have any significant narrative thrust. The plot can be essentially summed up in list form: Penelope meets her roommates; hangs out in her entryway; takes a silly-sounding General Education class; goes to a party at a club named “The S---,” kisses a drunk boy; kisses an awkward boy, kisses an “international playboy;” comps the Harvard Advocate; gets suckered into an extracurricular she hates; gets in a fight with her roommate; and eventually learns that everyone is pretending to be someone they’re not.

Most sophomores could check off at least half if not all the items on this list. But even if her experiences are typical, Penelope’s perspective is unique. Her observations are incisive and at times laugh-out-loud funny. One of her quips: “Homework was like a North Star that everyone turned to.” Her eccentric ideas of decorum—including if you say “hello,” “cool,” and “awesome,” everyone will like you—are endearing, yet she remains a strangely blank slate and never outgrows her awkwardness or social ineptitude.

Despite its lack of traditionally vital elements of storytelling, the novel works. There’s not much plot and the characters are not developed but it’s not the traditional coming-of-age story that would require those elements. The novel succeeds by virtue of its amusing and often searing profile of a dysfunctional Harvard that runs on elaborately bullshitted papers and even more elaborately constructed personae. Penelope manages to bump into all manner of Harvard caricatures, allowing Harrington’s satirical voice to shine.

NYC WHAC-A-MOLE

If the book’s cover—an image of two hands about to dig into a Veritaffle—is a gentle hint at the mockery to come, the first page is a slap in the face. The book opens with the correspondence between Penelope and her roommates. The first Facebook message, from Emma, sketches a gag-worthy portrait of the absurdly ambitious and unthinkably obnoxious girl from New York City. “I can’t believe I’m going to be missing out on New York pizza and dry cleaning for a whole four years!” she writes.

My freshman year often felt like a never-ending game of Whac-A-Mole, in which I whacked the New York private school stereotype instead of moles. The dry cleaning comment certainly elevated my blood pressure, but it was the following line in Emma’s note that made me twitch. In this emetic message, Emma mentions that she attended the Spence School—the very school I had attended for 13 years. While I knew many Emmas in my time at Spence, Harrington’s use of the proper noun seemed intrusive and impertinent.

Harrington’s trespassing continued when Penelope wanders into the comp for the fiction board of the Advocate, which Harrington depicts as a modish bastion of literary pretension. Besides the Advocate being the oldest continually published college literary magazine in America, it is also the magazine of which I recently became an enthusiastic member of both the poetry and executive boards.

The fiction editor of the Advocate, Patrick W. Lauppe ’13, also an arts editor of the Crimson, thinks Harrington took “easy shots” with her portrayal of the magazine. “‘Penelope’ is a tremendous achievement by a recent Harvard grad, and I really respect her for it,” Lauppe says. “And though I do recognize definite accuracies, which are pretty funny, I feel like it’s almost a freak show.”

“MUM SENT THE JET”

Harrington does not single out the Advocate in her satire. Most characters Penelope encounters are starring members  in Harrington’s circus of Harvard freaks. Penelope goes to the Peter Pan themed comp party at the Advocate hoping to run into Gustav, the sexy German/Argentinean billionaire from her “Counting People” section, a Gen Ed that actually was taught at Harvard. Though she doesn’t see him at the Peter Pan party, Penelope eventually ends up running into Gustav when Emma begrudgingly brings her to a party at the “S---” Club, where Gustav is a member. Before Gustav pulls Penelope into a confusing after-hours-only romance, he sends her a ridiculous text: “Skiing in Japan for foreseeable future and Mum sent the jet early. Drinks when we get back? xx.” While absurd, it might not be farfetched coming from the exotic and well-groomed men I often see smoking cigarettes on the stoop outside Schoenhof’s Foreign Books. It is unclear why this club was the only proper noun modified in the novel, as Harrington changes nothing else to disguise the fact that she is seemingly referring to the Spee.

Harrington’s stereotypes are obviously off-putting to the people who identify with these institutions. But perhaps pushing against these preconceptions and reconciling them with self-images might actually be formative to those individuals who are parodied. Penelope’s experiences are not actually formative at all; her sense of self is limited and does not develop over the course of the novel. However, this lack of definition in Penelope’s character, alongside her frustrating agreeability, not only makes her a comic contrast to the hyper-ambitious extremes around her but also makes her the only character the reader can identify with.  Every reader, explicitly targeted or not, can experience the simultaneously embracing and alienating experience of making friends and fitting in.

A LONESOME PACK

Dean of Freshmen Thomas A. Dingman ’67 understands the issue at hand in “Penelope.” He believes it is the responsibility of the Freshman Dean’s Office to provide spaces for interaction among the freshman class. He expresses frustration over the challenging layout of the Yard with its scant physical settings for social activities. “Hurlbut, Pennypacker and Greenough especially suffer from being away from things, but this summer we committed to converting a student suite in Pennypacker to a common room with a giant flat screen TV,” Dingman says.

Though Penelope and Harrington’s shared satirical outlook lends unusual sincerity to her novel, Harrington is hardly a duplicate of her hapless protagonist aside from both living in Pennypacker. I met her near Astor Place, around the corner from her office at The Huffington Post, where she has worked as a senior editor since graduating from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Stylish, cheery, and composed, Harrington chatted with me about the literary groundings of “Penelope” and about her experiences at Harvard.

While she made clear that her freshman experience was not exactly like Penelope’s, she did note some similarities. “Her life was basically more exciting and interesting than mine. She did more things…. I would go to the library, and I’d try to make friends with people there,” Harrington says with an air of self-deprecation. She also, like Penelope, often found herself hanging out on the steps outside Pennypacker.

Given Dingman’s worries, “Penelope” addresses valid concerns about the social challenges of freshman year. Furthermore, it challenges a prominently held view of the college experience and maturation more generally.

“THE LEGGINGS PARADOX”

Though Harrington wrote the manuscript of “Penelope” in four months, she edited it for two years, attempting to create a specific effect in opposition to the traditional American campus novel. She explained that she was reading a lot of 1930s British campus novels set at Oxford and Cambridge when she came up with the idea of Penelope. “Instead of viewing the educational experience as this kind of transcendentalist experience that deeply changes you as we do in America,” Harrington says, “in England it’s like, let’s go to five cocktail parties and be super embarrassing and funny.”

Harrington holds that Harvard is analogous to Oxbridge in American society, and it is particularly ripe for satire. “I had an experience that was much more like a linking together of absurd accidents than I did a transformative bildungsroman,” Harrington says. Her experience made it easier for her to identify with the madcap British campus novels.

Though parody may seem less powerful or profound than traditional bildungroman form, Harrington’s unique treatment is actually deeply insightful. “I purposefully made Penelope’s interiority shallow and socially expressed…. I think right or wrongly, people really think interiority is the vessel to profundity when you are reading,” Harrington says. “I’ve always felt that these novels about social experience are more elucidating than novels of interiority. Because we’re all the same, but there are so many quirks in the way people behave socially that are alienating and somehow extremely poignant even if you’re not particularly invested in the interiority of whoever’s there.” Indeed, the absence of interiority makes “Penelope” seem shallow, but it is precisely this shallowness that makes the novel uniquely illuminating. The lack of significance attached to individual events of the novel actually seems to assert how life, collegiate or otherwise, is less meaningful or transformative than we would like to think.

Though she did not write “Penelope” until after graduation, Harrington’s talent for comedic social commentary was evident in the fashion column she once wrote for the Crimson Arts section. At the end of each column, she would offer three tips for embracing or avoiding a certain fashion trend (e.g., “The Leggings Paradox Solved”). She may have thought her Crimson Arts career was a thing of the past, but in the spirit of tradition, I asked Harrington to offer three tips for incoming freshmen in this very issue. A few days after we met, she emailed me the following:

1) Your Harvard sweatshirt is not your friend.  It is, in fact, your enemy and should be regarded as such.

2) Your freshman year is a time to meet new people! Sit with random students in Annenberg and ask them hypothetical questions such as, ‘Would you rather be married to Jon Bon Jovi or live alone forever?’ Talk about endearing.

3) Have fun!  Remember, if you study less during the day than you were planning on, nothing will happen!  Except for eternal shame.

TRIVIAL PURSUITS

Another work of fiction set at Harvard, also released this year, serves as telling counterpoint to “Penelope.” “The Red Book” by Deborah E. Copaken Kogan ’88 centers around four best friends and roommates from the class of ’89 who return to Harvard for their 20th reunion in the throes of the economic recession. The novel takes its title and its structure from a publication that arrives at the doorsteps of Harvard alums once every five years. The Harvard Red Book, sent out by the Class Report Office, contains essays and contact information submitted by class members. The slogan of the novel presents its theme: “There’s the story you tell the world, and then there’s the real story.”

While Kogan’s novel, unlike Harrington’s, subscribes to the traditional view of education as a decisively formative experience, it seems to show that the experience is not a seamless, straightforward transformation. “We’re all just these fumbling, imperfect, silly people stumbling along in the dark trying to make our way in life. And unfortunately, having a Harvard degree means nothing when it comes to figuring oneself out,” Kogan says. “That’s the work that has to be done on your own, slowly and painfully through trial and error and lots and lots of mistakes.”

Both Kogan’s and Harrington’s novels challenge pre-existing ideas about Harvard and the broader genre of campus novels, but ultimately “Penelope” is the more shrewd of the two. Does it sincerely represent the undergraduate student body? Hardly. Did we expect it to, with its hot-pink cover emblazoned with a rare breed of Veritaffle containing not the Veritas shield but rather a large H? Not for a second. The best part about Harrington’s novel is how it does not attempt to be something it is not. Perhaps the lack of pretension and glamour surrounding the collegiate experience in “Penelope” is something to learn from. “It’s just a series of experiences,” Harrington says. “Some of them are okay. Some of them are not okay. And the stakes are pretty low no matter what.”

—Zoë K. Hitzig can be reached at zhitzig@college.harvard.edu.