Lucien by J. R. Thornton

Lucien

By J. R. Thornton

Harper Perennial 2026

It’s been 81 years since Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited warned readers of how dangerous elite schools can be for budding artists. In that famous story, young ingenue Charles Ryder goes up to Oxford and quickly falls under the hypnotic sway of elegant aristocratic fellow student Sebastian Flyte. It’s a spellbinding novel, which explains as well as anything why it’s been so incessantly imitated ever since.

The latest such imitation is J. R. Thornton’s bit of lightly-frosted autofiction, Lucien, in which budding artist Chris Novotny goes to Harvard and is dutifully broad-boarded by the sheer gaudy glory of the place. “Everyone seemed happy. No one looked down,” he thinks in one of the novel’s virtually numberless redundancies. “I wandered through the Square [that would be Harvard Square] in a kind of daze, swept along by a heady current of newfound possibility. This was my new home.”

Readers might be thinking “No, it’s not your new home, it’s a school you’re attending,” but Chris is sold on the place, and he shares with Charles Ryder the helpful quality of being basically a nonentity (“I was there to follow, not to ask questions or give an opinion,” he thinks at one point, long after readers will have noticed. “Which was fine because I didn’t have much of an opinion to give”). He wanders around until his daze is interrupted by fellow student Lucien Orsini-Conti, who’s everything Chris is not: “He was charming and sociable, handsome and confident, brilliant, rich, and enviable.”

Lucien never actually displays any of these qualities, but we’re repeatedly told he has them, so it must be true. Chris is certainly convinced and duly dazzled (“There was something intensely intimate about that blue-eyed gaze”) and starts running with Lucien’s louche, vaguely Euro-trash set, which alienates him more and more from the people in the previous boring old Baltimore stage of his life, including his kinda-sorta art mentor Marcus, who’s baffled when at one point the new, hedonistic Chris disappoints him. When their conversation finally ends, Chris immediately begins justifying his own rudeness. “I’d spent my whole life doing the smart thing, the responsible thing, the thing I was supposed to do,” he thinks, even though we’ve never seen him act that way or even really think about it, but wait, he’s got some whiny Gen-Z posturing to do: “And I was tired of it. I wanted to have some fun. Was that really so awful?”

Of course having some fun by endless self-indulgence or by badly disappointing people who’ve only ever supported you is, in fact, so awful, but it’s fairly clear in Lucien where your sympathies are supposed to lie.

Gradually, Lucien and Chris devise a dodgy plan to harness his artistic abilities, and gradually, Chris alienates pretty much all the new people in his life just as he’s alienated all the old people (one of them, as she’s on her way out the door, tells him “I hope you figure out who you want to be”; this is the kind of novel in which characters unironically say things like “I hope you figure out who you want to be”), and abruptly, after a bit of physical assault and a dab of drink-drugging, he comes to see the real Lucien, or at least to see that the old Lucien was almost entirely a façade. Much as in Brideshead Revisited, the story of the novel is told by an older and more embittered Chris looking back at his younger self.

Lucien is ultimately a silly novel, a feather-light fantasia on academic seduction that gets neither the academic nor the seduction parts quite right. This is the author’s second novel. By way of justification, that will have to do.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News