A Harvard Nancy Drew

THINK BACK to the people in your freshman seminar. How well did you ever actually know any of them? Maybe things went on in that seminar which you never even imagined. Cast your mind's eye over those impassive faces around the table, those voices making apparently innocent comments on the reading assignment. Could one of them have been--a murderer?

Such is the problem confronting Lauren Adler, a savvy first-semester freshman from New Jersey and the heroine of Victoria Silver's latest addition to the genre of Harvard fiction. Before one fateful Wednesday in November, the most serious question that plagues Lauren during her Russian Revolution seminar is which of its 11 students is the most attractive. But then Russel Bernard, the star of both the seminar and Lauren's personal musings, is murdered and his body thrown into the Charles, in a manner that bizarrely recalls the murder of Rasputin discussed in her last seminar meeting. And on this clue alone, Lauren, with the help of a roommate and an upstairs neighbor, turns detective.

The desire of Harvard-nurtured to write Harvard novels is, of course, not new. And as Amanda Cross and Erich Segal have already demonstrated, and Silver makes abundantly clear, there are ways of satisfying that urge which do not involve subjecting the reading public to an embarrassing wallow in nostalgic meditation. Not that the excesses of more "serious" Harvard novelists such as George A. Weller '29 and Faye Levine '65 aren't understandable; writers are supposed to write from experience, and any Harvard career as Real and Grand and Full as these writers seem to have had just cries out to be transfigured through Art. Such explorations of What It All Meant, unfortunately, are rarely of much interest to anyone but other, equally nostalgic Harvard alumni; at least no novelist yet has struck quite the right balance between University and universality.

No one, that is, except the canny souls who sidestep the problem altogether, and this is Silver's eminently successful strategy. To say that Harvard is merely the backdrop for Death of a Harvard Freshman wouldn't be quite fair; most of the plot elements are uniquely Harvard, from the Nietzsche course which sends one student over the brink to the rivalry between Lauren, defiant product of the New Jersey public school system, and a stuffy preppie couple from Exeter. And Silver gets endless mileage out of Lauren's freshman-week-esque enthusiasm over her classmates' brilliance and diversity:

Why had she fallen for him like this? In part it was simply overwhelming sexual attraction: the eyes, the skin, the beard, the hands.... And there were Russell's accomplishments: his story in The New Yorker, his national political lobby. And he did play the violin, not to mention soccer. Lauren was not above being bowled over by some qualifications which had convinced the Harvard admissions committee.

BUT CALLING the book a Harvard novel would be equally silly, for Death of a Harvard Freshman is assuredly no novel. It is completely and unabashedly a detective story, and a light-hearted one at that, with Harvard providing the splotches of local color. Its closest relative in the genre is Amanda Cross's Death in a Tenured Position, which has the same lightly sardonic tone. But unlike Cross's book, which unfolded among the junior faculty of the Harvard English Department with only an occasional student flashing across the screen, Silver's is firmly rooted in the Yard.

And though her approach to her alma mater betrays little reverence, it is on the whole both affectionate and cheerful. In Lauren's classes, nobody ever does the reading. In the manner of freshmen before their first Reading Period, they spend untold hours going through the facebook, taking romantic walks by the Charles (at least until Russell is murdered there), and piecing together who knew whom in high school. Lauren's roommate Carol, who is comping for The Crimson, bothers her endlessly with story ideas. The quality of Union food receives a slightly ludicrous amount of play. There is no construction in the Square (Silver graduated in '78), but otherwise, as far as detail goes, Death of a Harvard Freshman could be your roommate's diary.

Not that all this local color doesn't include some serious issues. Lauren confronts quite a few of them as she works her way from suspect to suspect: the South Africa divestiture movement, the Black tables in the Union, a young Richmond aristocrat struggling with his homosexuality. None of it particularly fazes Lauren, who comes across as a sort of Nancy Drew with high SAT scores.

One can easily envision her bouncing through an endless series of Harvard mysteries, never becoming a sophomore--Mystery in Store 24, The Stoughton Stalkers. The Secret of Science B-15....) Confronted with Harvard's masculine ethos, she gleefully covers all the surfaces in her room with Chanel bottles. Faced by the suspicion that her Saturday night date may be Russell's murderer, she takes him to Bailey's for a sundae and plies him with hot fudge sauce until he yields up the truth.

SILVER'S PLOT is thoroughly satisfying, bringing the requisite twists and red herrings to a believable and unexpected conclusion. It achieves some of its snap at the expense of the characters--for the most part a lively gallery of caricatures--and the writing style, which has moments of undeniable clunkiness ("Brian's mental capabilities did not include that of judging what was too obvious to require saying....Sandy gave him a look of hatred.") But because of Silver's lack of pretensions, these shortcomings rarely prove troublesome and sometimes even help. For instance, Lauren's own Bess and George--her wacky Southern Californian roommate Carol, who wears hotpants and lame sandals, and her best friend Michael, a gorgeous gay preppie from an old Boston family--are funny largely because they are overdone.

And in the end such lack of pretensions makes Death of a Harvard Freshman effective and amusing even to readers who have and will never be able to confirm Silver's lyrical description in the ravioli in the Freshman Union. Rather than letting Harvard overwhelm her story, Silver keeps her view affectionately mocking, her landscape tiny. Jane Austen once described her own novels as etchings on a square inch of ivory, rather than canvases to dominate a room. That strategy, it seems, could only help the vast majority of Harvard novelists.