Fiction by La Farge

The long short-story is not a particularly popular form, but Paul La Farge packs life into exactly that bag. It’s a bag Kafka and Chekov used with gusto–think of the Metamorphosis or The Duel. In Bleak College Days, La Farge too stakes out territory at the wind-buffeted border between the short story and the novel. Here’s a tale of a grimy college existence that starts out in trickery and ends in defeat and isolation, not to mention bewildered enlightenment of a melancholy variety. In fact, a seething hoard of platitudinous adjectives and witty phrases come to our minds when trying to describe this story, and so you’re better off just reading the thing for yourself, but here it goes: La Farge’s tale is–what shall we say?–meaty, carefully paced, dark and stormy, driving, sensuous (in a weird East Coast way), epic, burgeoning, hour-consuming, requiring a kind of thinking that’s the opposite of reading your email… Bleak College Days by Paul La Farge.