The new novel “The Devil and Webster” by Jean Hanff Korelitz examines the tumult on a college campus in our current protest-everything-always moment.
The story kicks off with the tale of a transgender student, who has transitioned from female to male all the while living in a women’s dorm on campus. The women of the dorm are outraged. They have dutifully accepted that someone who has been born female but now identifies as a male is actually, fully, a male. So what is he doing in their dorm? It’s a good question.
The protagonist of the story, Naomi Roth, a Dean of Women’s Affairs at the fictitious liberal arts university Webster College, where the story takes place, becomes the University’s President in the aftermath of the scandal. It’s not that she handles it particularly well, the situation mostly resolves itself, but she has the right language to say about it.
There is no right action in this world, only wrong. No matter what the university attempts to do to calm tensions is seen as the exactly wrong approach. It’s the same reality as our own.
What should a university do about a transgender student who has transitioned from female to male but continues to live in a woman’s dorm? These kinds of conversations are happening all around the country, in various ways. They are often dismissed as “bathroom” debates but peeing in the stall next to someone is never the actual issue. We don’t know what do in this dorm situation; the same as we don’t know what to do when a male to female transgender person wants to be on a female wrestling team, all the while still having the body strength of a man; which is the same as we don’t know what to do when a transgender girl who still has boy parts wants to use the girls’ locker room. Those who claim to know what to do in these cases can’t possibly know.
We may have the best intentions on how to figure it out but this tense moment in America’s history doesn’t allow for nuanced conversations and “wrong!” or worse is the response to any idea on how to navigate these uncharted waters.
In the novel, the decision to leave the transgender student in the female dorm has female students comparing the situation to rape. When the escalation is always to these most extreme arguments, there is little possibility of finding common ground. and then the stress of being unwelcome in the female dorm causes the transgender student to attempt suicide. There is no “right” way.
This isn’t even the main story in the novel, however. The story is focused on how Naomi handles the protests that erupt on her campus and refuse to end. The college kids take to their quad to camp out to protest a popular black professor being refused tenure. They imagine his tenure rejection is the product of racism. In fact, he has been found to be a plagiarist and the administration is unable to be public about that fact lest he sue them. Still, there’s no getting the students off their hands. Their confidence in their wrong opinion is only nurtured by the staff who knows better. At a loss for what to do about the protesters, Naomi thinks to herself, “Unless you were a Ronald Reagan, bulldozing an encampment of protesters and blithely loping on into the future until it was Morning in America for all! (Or at least for everyone who mattered!) But Naomi was no Ronald Reagan (thank all that was holy for that).” She certainly isn’t.
A side story in the novel is the hard time Naomi has connecting to her daughter Hannah. Hannah attends Webster, and is among the protesters accusing the institution of racism in the wake of the tenure denial. Naomi can’t engage with her whatsoever. She had long ago moved to being her daughter’s friend instead of parent and now finds it impossible to go back.
In an interview with Vogue magazine, Korelitz seems surprised that her book would be construed as a criticism of the current politically correct campus culture. “I have learned so much about this book from reading the reviews,” she told Vogue. “For example! I have learned that this novel is a satire. I have learned that it is not a satire. I have learned that it is a semi-satire and that it’s taking on something called “identity politics,” which to be brutally honest, I had never even investigated that term until a couple of days ago. It’s not that the ideas are alien to me, it’s that supposedly I’ve written this book as some sort of indictment of an ism that I didn’t even know existed until a few days ago.”
Whether Korelitz realizes it or not, the ism she’s criticising most vigorously is infantilism or what we do to college kids that allows them to spend four years in a cocoon of their own opinions and approving of all they do. When we allow people barely out of childhood to control the conversation, to police the language, to set the parameters of what is right or wrong, we don’t let them grow into the kind of adults who are seeking to make meaningful, positive, changes to our society. Letting them exist in their echo chamber, where their way is the only right way, will lead to them getting a tough wakeup call when school’s out and not everyone in the world cares about their opinion anymore.