Pocket Review: My Education by Susan Choi

My Education
Susan Choi
Viking Adult, 2013

Schadenfreude is a wonderful thing: we can watch empires fall and wonder why they didn’t have better homeowners’ insurance or more canned goods, whatever satisfies that secret need for smugness that we all need to indulge once in a while. A novel entitled My Education promises something along those lines too. We’re going to see someone learn something! Someone else, who’s not us. It suggests a spectacle, and for most of Susan Choi’s tale of impulsive love, it is—although not, ultimately, in the way you might imagine.

The educatee in question is Regina Gottlieb, a graduate student in an unnamed literary discipline at an unnamed upstate university (you can call it Cornell if you want). The education she has in mind, though, is something a bit less academic. Choi doesn’t mess around; in the book’s opening sentence she throws us right up against the object of Regina’s intentions, the notoriously caddish professor Nicholas Brodeur. The fact that he’s got a terrible reputation and stands accused of numerous instances of moral turpitude, coupled with a case of extreme attractiveness, render Regina basically powerless not to pursue him. (Motives don’t figure heavily in this story, nor do they need to.) And pursue him she does until, at a marvelously uncomfortable dinner party at his home, she meets, makes out with, and promptly initiates an affair with Brodeur’s wife, Martha.

It’s a hot affair, to be sure. It sizzles off the page. Choi knows how to write a sex scene, but it’s her bracketing—the lead-up, the dénouement—that reverberates. Consider Regina, after her first marathon roll with Martha:

I felt the peculiar gratification of having been made a taxidermy of myself, disassembled and rebuilt with some sort of narcotic-soaked gauze densely stuffed in my cavities—I was that deeply satisfied, down to my marrow; all the bones in my pelvis seems loosened and bobbling around.

Just in case you didn’t catch it the first time around, this is good sex. But Regina is 21 and ripe for experience, whereas Martha is in her mid-30s, married with a new baby, and has no intention—no potential—to give herself over completely. Regina is passionate and obsessive, Martha is passionate and withholding, and not even the best sex in the world is going to remedy the imbalance of power between them. And herein lies the titular lesson: that youth and beauty, though excellent currency, are still no match for… well, anything, really. Regina exists in that classic American late adolescence where being a grownup is still a rumor, and all its trappings—the baby, the good car, the dinner party—dwell in some fabled shadowland. And while there are plenty of people out there who trudge dutifully in that general direction, from their teens through their 20s, until they reach it, there are plenty of us who needed to get there—if indeed we have gotten there—the hard way. I was half hoping in some selfish corner of my brain that My Education would bring back that visceral thrill of infatuation and lust, the joys of throwing caution to the wind, but the real elusive turn-on here turns out to be adulthood. As Regina puts it,

I’d like to say I defied gravity just as often as feeling its snare, but my efforts were more likely spent clinging on with white knuckles to not be dislodged. Still, that was my heroism—my tenacious fidelity to her, though it was based on a grave misperception. I thought desire was duty. No trial could not be endured nor impediment smashed in desire’s holy service, or so I believed, with naïve righteousness. I didn’t grasp that desire and duty could rival each other, least of all that they most often do.

And so we get to watch her crash and burn in the name of love, and because Choi is a fine writer it’s a pleasure—she does extreme drunkenness as well as she does sex, for one thing. Also because, if the reader pays any attention to names, she will know from the start that a protagonist named Regina (“Queen”) Gottlieb (“God’s love”) will surely survive. Ironically, this is where youth comes in handy: it may lead you to hit bottom, but chances are you’ll bounce. She bounces almost too conveniently well, in fact—eventually, after getting fired from a literary agency job, writing a purposefully lowbrow “young-girl-in-the-city rehash” that goes on to become an unexpected bestseller; marrying wisely, if not passionately; and being unexpectedly blindsided by the grownup version of hot passion, motherlove. But that’s OK. We’re rooting for her by the novel’s end, even if she is a bit of a pain in the ass.

This is not Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, and Choi sidesteps any pointed sociological context. The fact that the grand love affair here involves two women is less a political point, or an effort to ground the story in a particular time, it seems, than a leveling of the playing field. The asymmetry between Regina and Martha has everything to do with their ages, stations in life, and motivations; gender is not part of this equation. My Education does end up being sentimental, though, almost unsettlingly so, and by the time Regina has made her version of amends for the various relationships she’s torn through, it’s tempting to miss the rest of the book’s damp messiness.

But she has wanted adulthood so badly. She has lusted after Martha’s competence almost as much as her touch, yearned for capability and ripeness, which is what has made the book more than a fable of neediness thwarted. When Martha helps her furnish her first solo apartment, Regina gets a glimpse of what it is she really wants:

Along with all these things of hers into my rooms had come a smell, encyclopedic and subtle, like a threadbare tapestry on some epic subject: her former lovers and gardens and meals and travels and sails and wounds and orgasms and perhaps even failures, a dusty and vegetal, floral and heat-baked and cool-moist and unnameable smell. The smell of her past, her past self, here where my self was seeking its future.

In the end, it feels almost uncharitable to begrudge her the book’s smooth closure. It’s to Choi’s credit that Regina is more sweet than sour, and that My Education invokes more compassion than schadenfreude. It’s a complicated book, but a good one, and it’s not a terrible thing to be reminded of those days when the prospect of becoming a real live adult was still exhilarating.