… a new novel by Diane Meier, is a mix of university novel and chick lit. Unlike much contemporary academic fiction, it doesn’t take up some grand theme (sexual harassment, political correctness, free speech, student unrest), but instead focuses throughout on the emotional awakening of a repressed professor, Joy Harkness.

In her book Faculty Towers, Elaine Showalter notes that “While earlier academic novels had been idyllic, satiric, ironic, or even embittered,” more recent instances of the genre, by writers like Philip Roth and Francine Prose, tend to be “cosmic, mythic, and vengeful.”

Meier’s novel is none of these things. It is more like Jane Eyre, a first-person account of a withdrawn and emotionally wounded woman’s emergence out of self-protective self-control. Like Jane, Harkness, an English professor, substitutes the world of literature for a personal reckoning:

We humans are, after all, lying in wait for the next great story. I know. Literature is my game. I hand the playing cards to the next generations: Emma Bovary and Jay Gatsby, Hester Prynne and Othello, Medea, Newland Archer and Daily Miller – their stories are what carry me back into the classroom each day; they are the reasons I get out of bed. The thing I might not really wish to look at is that their stories may have been so compelling, they allowed me to put off creating my own.

The reflections on literature Meier places throughout the narrative, though, aren’t particularly illuminating, since the writers Harkness admires most – in particular, Henry James – feature themes at odds with the comic and even utopian themes at the core of chick-lit. The attainability of radical self-transformation toward moral perfection and domestic bliss is the fundamental conviction of chick-lit, and this conviction animates The Season of Second Chances. Consider, on the other hand, the fate of the characters Harkness just listed: Bovary, Miller, Gatsby, Othello, Medea…

So there’s a curious knottedness at the center of this novel. It must convince us of Joy’s initial dark Jamesian convolutions; it must then make her breakthrough into the light plausible and sympathetic. But – in accordance with its genre – this is a relentlessly plot-driven novel. It has no time for the dense flows of interiority James gives us for people like Isabel Archer.

Novels like the Bridget Jones series also, like Season, offer self-consciously literary narrators, but in their purely comic way these narrators are aware of the vast gulf between the realities of their ridiculous lives and the grand romantic contrivances of their favorite heroines’ lives. Season of Second Chances lacks this comic lightness; it’s morally didactic in a pretty straightforward way.

I liked the novel, actually — it was easy to keep reading. But Season locates itself in an ultimately less than satisfying fictional netherworld — it’s neither a modernist Jamesian novel affording us the pleasure of insight into the ambiguities and entrapments of moral consciousness, nor a postmodern confection like the Bridget Jones novels, affording us the weightless pleasure of satirical self-recognition. I guess I’m saying that for me, an English professor happy to encounter English professors in the pages of novels, Joy’s being an English professor – being in a university setting at all – seemed incidental.