AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Fifteen years is a long time. OK, well, maybe not in the grand scheme of the universe, but a lot of things can change in 15 years. Novelist Chad Harbach's 2011 hit novel, "The Art Of Fielding," was about a college baseball player who gets the yips. And in his new book, "The Brightness," he returns to that same campus. But instead of baseball, he's writing about sexual abuse, media frenzies and female friendships. Harbach spoke with Andrew Limbong, host of NPR's Book of the Day podcast.
ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: Chad Harbach's first book, "The Art Of Fielding," is set in the fictional small liberal arts school, Westish College. It's picturesque, in a way. You can see and feel the quad and the trees and the students and the books and the parties. It can make a certain type of person nostalgic for those good old days. But not Harbach. He wanted nothing to do with Westish College after that first book.
CHAD HARBACH: There was no moment in the composition of "The Art Of Fielding" where I ever thought I was going to go back to that world. And then I just kind of sat down with my notebook and just, like, started writing about Pella Affenlight from "The Art Of Fielding," and just couldn't shake it.
LIMBONG: Pella was a side character in "Fielding." She's center stage in Harbach's new book "The Brightness." You don't have to read the first one to appreciate this one. It's not that type of sequel. It's not even a sequel, really, but let me catch you up. At the start of this book, Pella is 27, and she's just graduated Westish, which means she's a little older than her peers, including her friend, Irma.
HARBACH: Irma's 21. She's beginning her senior year at Westish College, as the book begins, and she is - she's from the Driftless Area in southwest Wisconsin, from, like, a very rural background, very modest, not to say, even poor background. Westish College is, like, a big world to her because of where she's from, but, you know, she is herself, just because of her kind of academic brilliance and her ferocity. Also destined for a bigger world herself.
LIMBONG: At the beginning of the book, Irma and her two fellow classmates, Dahlia and Pammy, do a prank. And without spoiling it, maybe the word prank is selling what they do short. It's more political than that. It's an action to draw attention to sexual abuse on college campuses, and it does end up drawing a lot of attention - on them.
HARBACH: You know, I think it's characteristic of that age, right?
LIMBONG: Yeah.
HARBACH: For 20- and 21-year-olds to not really know what's going to happen. Like, they have an idea. They're full of passion, and they just do it, you know?
LIMBONG: Yeah.
HARBACH: And of course, the way that the prank reverberates out into the world, the consequences are not something they have carefully considered in advance, you know, which I think is true of, like, what I and a lot of people were like at that age.
LIMBONG: The book takes place in 2015 and '16, and in a way, it feels like a period piece. The internet plays a big part in how news of the prank spreads, but we're in a pre-TikTok world. We're in a pre-COVID world, in a pre-President Trump world.
HARBACH: There were moments along the way when I began to worry that the setting of the book at that moment could be odd or a weakness, that this prank, you know, certainly has, you know, a lot of resonances with the kind of explosion of the #MeToo movement in 2017, right? But in my writing about that stuff preceded #MeToo. And then when the #MeToo movement blew up, I wasn't sure how the book was going to seem in the light of that. You know, but I think reading the book now, it seems to really capture, actually, this very important moment in 2015 and '16 when we're on the verge of Trump's election, we're on the verge of what Trump said on the bus. We're on the verge of the Women's March. And I think of that time as kind of an originary moment for the present.
LIMBONG: Yeah.
HARBACH: So I think it captures that moment very well, actually.
LIMBONG: Harbach is well aware of that he's a guy writing a book centered on women.
Were the optics something you were thinking about?
HARBACH: Well, I mean, first of all, the idea that it was going to be a female-centric story was just inherent in the project from Day 1. Like, as soon as I decided to return to this world, you know, one of the ways in which I knew right away that I wanted to invert, subvert, whatever you want to say about that world, was that this was going to be a book about female friendship and relationships in a way that "The Art Of Fielding" was about male friendships and relationships.
So for me, the women who are in this book, you know, Pella, Irma, Dahlia, Pammy, Katrina, Sylvie, I have lived with these people for 13 years now. Pella, even much longer. They all just really feel like aspects of myself in some way. As people, I just feel like I really deeply understand them, so I didn't feel anxiety in the writing about writing these women.
LIMBONG: You know, you just mentioned there that this book is very much about female friendships, whereas "Art Of Fielding" was about male friendships. In writing the both of them, what's the difference?
HARBACH: (Laughter) I mean - yeah. I mean, I think if the differences were simple, I wouldn't have had to write 1,200 pages about it.
LIMBONG: (Laughter) Thank you so much, Chad.
HARBACH: Yeah. Thank you, Andrew.
RASCOE: That was NPR's Andrew Limbong speaking with author Chad Harbach. For the full interview about his new novel, "The Brightness," check out NPR's Book of the Day podcast feed. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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