Everything Looks Impressive - Softcover

Hugh Kennedy is Professor of Arabic in the Faculty of Languages and Cultures at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. He studied Arabic at the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies before reading Arabic, Persian, and hstory at Cambridge. He was formerly a professor of history at the University of St. Andrews, a position he had held since 1972.

This endearing bildungsroman depicts a college freshman confronting sexual politics and the leisure class at Yale. Kennedy does a fine job of tracing out what happens when young people who have too much time and too much money are set free from the constraints of parents and boarding-school dorm mothers. Alex, whose parents run a set of tourist cabins in Maine, attends Yale on scholarship, having wished all his life to join the elite in the halls of Ivy. He falls in with a prep school crowd of budding nihilists whom he loves and hates at the same time. Along the way, he meets and becomes obsessed with Jill, a senior who has a female lover but sends him ambiguous signals of desire. When Jill is beaten in a campus gay-bashing incident and dies, Alex is forever changed. He plays a key role in the investigation and decides that the simpler values he left behind were not so terrible after all. Following Christmas break, he returns to New Haven to make a new start (with a fresh perspective). This 1980s update on Fitzgerald, though at times as self-indulgent and full of itself as the pretentious people it portrays, is a promising first novel. Author tour.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.