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The Rule of Four
Reviewed by Hilary M. Schor
Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason.
New York: The Dial Press, 2004.
Anyone who has visited the Princeton campus lately knows that it retains a powerful source of its mystery: not a single sign mars the placid perfection of the campus. My own university has enough signage to guide several walking tours, but even so, strangers and students alike wander in perplexity, guessing at the relationship between “THH” and the English department, or wondering how the lecture hall in the School of Social Work became “MRF 101.” This disorientation runs deeper than the bafflement of acronyms; it reflects the confusion we all feel at “the campus,” wondering what brings students, teachers, books, knowledge, laboratories, and quaint traditions all together behind a series of ivy-covered walls. To my mind, this dislocation helps us understand not only why people continue to write but also (far more surprising) why they continue to read campus novels.
Not that The Rule of Four, a first novel by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason (boyhood friends and recent Ivy League graduates), is only an academic novel. It lays claim to a complicated heritage, for it is, as its cover suggests, the offspring of unholy matings between novelists Umberto Eco, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dan Brown, and Donna Tartt. The novel invokes a series of genres: intellectual puzzler, coming-of-age novel, touching tale of friendship, and disturbing murder mystery. These strands are unified by a tale of four best friends wandering the Princeton campus over a single weekend, seeking the meaning of friendship, the nature of romantic love, the solution to the mystery of a five-hundred-year-old text, and the answer to the question that haunts students everywhere, Is there life after graduation?
The four principals of the novel are the type of incongruous comrades featured prominently in boys’ school novels, war films, and science fiction expeditions—a black kid paired with a rich boy; the premed student teasing the English major; one guy a fan of Audrey Hepburn and another (and here we enter only-in-fiction-land) obsessed with a Renaissance mystery text understandable in four languages, several of them dead—and none of them, of course, English. The challenge for the talented young novelists is twofold: first, keeping the dilemmas, heartbreaks, and confusions of collegiate friendships in front of us, while, second, doing justice to what initially seems the authors’ deeper love, the lure of the almost-known, a book of puzzle literature that has captivated erudite readers for five centuries. Put another way, Caldwell and Thomason have set themselves an almost unreachable goal: writing a bestseller about finishing the senior thesis.
Their response is clever. The bloody, fiery, world-upending events of the novel take place in a single weekend, Easter weekend of the friends’ final year at Princeton, and at times move us forward in a compelling rush of desperate activity. Alternating chapters, however, take us back to the childhood of the narrator-hero, Thomas Corelli Sullivan, and even to the years before his birth, when his father first discovered his academic calling; it sends us searching into the four-years friendship of the four roommates; and, most significantly, it initiates us into the mysteries of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the Renaissance text that entrances the hero’s father, his best friend, and, at significant moments of his life, the hero himself.
The novel works hard to align its Renaissance mystery with the more profound mysteries of the human heart, romantic love, and college friendship, and it hums with nostalgia for that world of staying up late, deciphering unknown texts, and making sense of unknown tongues—both those of dead languages and those of living friends. Thomason and Caldwell lay claim to a truth that most university faculty are slow to admit: what we learn in college has much more to do with those studying around us than with those attempting to teach us. Professors in this novel are at best ineffectual and at worst self-serving and venial, when not actually thieving murderers, and the administrators seem to have thrown up their hands altogether. If we were to plan a tour of Princeton based on The Rule of Four, we would spend a brief time in classrooms, slightly longer in Firestone Library or the art museum, and a great deal of time at the Ivy, one of the eating clubs that form the core of Princeton’s undergraduate life. The novel’s final blaze, its version of the bonfire of the vanities, takes place at the Ivy and marks a phoenix-like destruction and renewal of its characters. It is no accident that the novel links finishing the senior thesis with Easter weekend. It is a moment of both crucifixion and resurrection; a moment of emancipation, to which the novel repeatedly hearkens; a moment when one’s work truly becomes one’s own and when a boy truly becomes a man.
This is very much a young man’s book (its romantic plot by far its least convincing element), but it tells a strange story. It is moving not so much for its intellectual quest as for its powerful yearning for such a quest—its sense that, somehow, college offered a moment of structured wandering, of licensed and arcane chaos, that cannot be recaptured. This wistfulness is very different from the elitism that made Donna Tartt’s The Secret History such an uncomfortable read, or the slippery self-referentiality one delights in when reading Umberto Eco. This is a novel about not quite finishing things. Its favorite Princetonian is F. Scott Fitzgerald, the university’s most famous dropout, and the hero’s best friend (and intellectual idol) finally leaves Princeton without collecting his degree. At the book’s end, the narrator contemplates a photo he and his college girlfriend took together, “both holding one side of the camera and pointing it towards ourselves. The campus chapel is behind us, stony and still, Princeton whispering in the background even now.” The lure of Princeton is strangely hard to escape, but in some ways the novel doesn’t want to escape it. To the intelligent and to the lonely, college years can offer the best of those mysteries—or so it can seem in retrospect. The four heroes of this novel may be romantic egotists, as the young Fitzgerald claimed of himself, but there is something touching about their shared pursuit of the puzzles of the past. The Rule of Four would be a finer novel, however, if it made us care a little more about what awaits them in the years after college—if it made us believe there was life after finishing your senior thesis. Lacking that belief, readers of the novel (like itinerant tourists on a little-known, unmarked campus) may find themselves, sadly, wandering the groves of academe forever.
Hilary M. Schor is professor of English at the University of Southern California.
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