It Will Come to Me: A Novel

This first novel from the acclaimed memoirist Emily Fox Gordon is a tart and intelligent comedy of manners revolving around the Humanities department of a large southern university. It is also a story about the comforts and grievances of a marriage of longstanding: Ben is a professor of philosophy; Ruth is his wife--a writer whose early literary success never quite blossomed into a career as a novelist and who nurtures sometimes noisy and sometimes private rebellions against the conventions and expectations of a faculty spouse. Their lives have settled into the seasons of the academic year--the requisite Pot Luck dinners, the endless committee meetings, the long-observed rituals of dubious importance.

Except that this year holds the possibility of change: An ethereal, celebrated young memoirist and her husband, an intellectual jack-of-all trades with transgressive impulses, are arriving on campus as visiting writer and adjunct. Ruth thrills to the possiblity that this literary duo will prove to be the catalyst for her reinvention and put her back in touch with her former self--whoever that person once was...

Emily Fox Gordon's withering, wry depiction of academic life calls to mind the timeless comic novels of David Lodge, while her mature and finely-wrought observations about marriage and relationships are reminiscent of the fiction of Alison Lurie. It Will Come to Me is a delight--engaging, wise, superbly written, and very, very funny.

This first novel from the acclaimed memoirist Gordon is a tart and intelligent comedy of manners revolving around the Humanities department of a large Southern university. It is also a story about the comforts and grievances of a marriage of longstanding.

Ben Blau is the reluctant chair of the philosophy department of the Lola Dees Institute, surrounded by a bestiary of academic innocents and opportunists. His wife, Ruth—a writer whose early success never quite blossomed into a career—nurtures sometimes noisy and sometimes private rebellions against the conventions of academic life. Their lives have settled, if not always comfortably, into a dull ceremonial round of convocations, committee meetings, and pot-luck dinners. To Ruth it seems that nothing will ever change.

Except that this year a new couple has arrived on campus: an ethereal, celebrated young memoirist and her husband, an intellectual jack-of-all-trades and perpetual misfit. Something about these two throws the staid academic world of the Lola Dees Institute into comic chaos and revives Ruth’s hopes that she might become, once again, the writer she used to be.