Occasionally, you will encounter a book that seems custom-made for you. Emily Adrian’s “Seduction Theory” is that kind of book.
Set in a milieu with which you are familiar (small graduate creative writing program)? Check.
Has fundamentally decent but flawed characters trying to figure out how to live despite those flaws? Check.
A plot that unfolds with clear, character-motivated logic that also manages to surprise and keep you wondering how things might end? Check.
Funny? Check. Check. Check.
I don’t have a lot of critical defenses against this kind of book, so I can’t guarantee that my experience will be every reader’s experience. But perhaps if I describe my experience accurately enough, you will know if this is a book for you.
“Seduction Theory” is primarily the story of Simone and Ethan, a married couple and members of the Edwards University creative writing department. Simone is an academic superstar: an acclaimed scholar, author of a bestselling memoir about grief and a magnetic classroom presence. She is also glamorously beautiful. Ethan is the author of a critically acclaimed, prize-nominated novel but doesn’t have much to show for his efforts in recent years. He is tall and handsome. They appear devoted to each other.
While the story is primarily Simone and Ethan’s, we learn at the outset that the person telling the story is Roberta Green, and we are actually reading her MFA thesis that will be submitted to the creative writing department at Edwards University.
The novel/thesis opens in standard third person as we are introduced to a scene at the end-of-year creative writing department party. Our narrator unfurls an encounter of Ethan possibly flirting with Abigail, the single-mom department secretary who is nowhere close to Simone’s league in terms of glamour or accomplishment, but to whom Ethan appears to be drawn.
Just as we’re settling in, Roberta shows up as a first-person “I,” because of course she is also at the party. Roberta is a student of both Simone and Ethan’s, and she is convinced — with some reason — that perhaps she is on the verge of consummating an affair with Simone. They have grown close as mentor and mentee, and Simone has decided not to join Ethan on a yearly pilgrimage back to Portland to see his mother. But guess who will be in Portland at the same time as Ethan? Abigail.
Complications, that shall remain vague for the sake of the reader’s pleasure, ensue.
As a narrator, Roberta is part spy, part participant, part psychologist, part fabulist, both partly reliable, partly unreliable.
In lesser hands, the story of husband and wife getting a mid-marriage itch for adventure could be banal, but Adrian (via Roberta) probes the hearts and minds of her characters in a way that reveals the combination of desire and stupidity that rests in all of our hearts, and that has the potential to lead us to both our greatest triumphs and worst defeats.
The fact that it is Roberta mediating what we’re privy to adds a pleasing layer of metafictional complication but does so in a way that also gives us access to Roberta’s interior as we see her authorial choices in telling the story, sometimes even doubling back to re-tell a previous episode. As the novel turns toward its conclusion, we see that Simone and Ethan are going to have to reckon with their story, as told by another.
I felt for all these people by the end, while also finding great comedy in their many foibles.
I also read “Seduction Theory” in a single sitting, perhaps proving the accuracy of its title.
John Warner is the author of books including “More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI.” You can find him at biblioracle.com.
Book recommendations from the Biblioracle
John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.
1. “The Vulnerables” by Sigrid Nunez
2. “The Wedding People” by Alison Espach
3. “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë
4. “15 Wild Decembers” by Karen Powell
5. “Franny and Zooey” by J.D. Salinger
— Gail R., Chicago
I think Christine Sneed’s “Paris, He Said” will be a good fit for Gail. Like some of these other books, it’s about a person trying to find their way without a strong sense of where to go. Maybe that’s just every novel, though.
1. “The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle” by Stuart Turton
2. “The Stolen Queen” by Fiona Davis
3. “A Different Kind of Power” by Jacinda Ardern
4. “Going Home in the Dark” by Dean Koontz
5. “It Can’t Happen Here” by Sinclair Lewis
— Dominick M., Chicago
“Last Resort” by Andrew Lipstein has some psychological suspense that should work for Dominick.
1. “Oleander, Jacaranda” by Penelope Lively
2. “This Strange Eventful History” by Claire Messud
3. “Stone Yard Devotional” by Charlotte Wood
4. “In Morocco” by Edith Wharton
5.”In Arabian Nights” by Tahir Shah
— Kathleen H., La Grange
For Kathleen, I’m recommending one of the writers I find the most consistently on target, Meg Wolitzer, specifically “The Female Persuasion.”
Get a reading from the Biblioracle
Send a list of the last five books you’ve read and your hometown to biblioracle@gmail.com.