The Life of the Mind: A Novel

"Christine Smallwood’s debut novel breathes fresh life into the venerable genre of academic farce. Her heroine, Dorothy, is a graduate student and adjunct professor of literature whose dissertation, appropriately enough, is on female confinement in Gothic literature. An academic conference in Las Vegas is the comic highlight here, but along with lots of erudite humor about the likes of Frank O’Hara and Samuel Beckett, this novel movingly dramatizes the erosion of dreams and the slow leak of youthful buoyancy."