A defensive lineman the size of a refrigerator bursts into a teammate’s bedroom on the morning after the big parties, two black words stencilled across his forehead, and starts slamming chemistry textbooks onto the carpet. In the bed, wrapped in a sheet, an art student named Pammy quietly lifts her phone and films him. By dinner the clip has thousands of views. By the next morning a women’s website has picked it up, and strangers on both coasts are debating whether the lineman is an actor. The Brightness by Chad Harbach begins with a stunt, and the stunt spreads the way things spread in 2015: faster than anyone involved can think about what it means.
The stunt belongs to three seniors who call themselves the Witches of Westish, and the college is the same lakeshore school where Harbach set The Art of Fielding fifteen years ago. The new novel follows two women in the year after that night. Pella is nearly twenty-eight, freshly graduated and engaged, with nothing much to do. Irma is twenty-one and the cleverest student on campus. It was published on 27 October 2026, and it is a book of parties, arguments and slow realisations rather than events.
The Witches Have a Theory
The prank is presented as a work of art with a thesis, and Harbach takes the thesis seriously. The idea is to give the young men who run the party scene one morning of the dread that women at those parties carry home. Irma writes the anonymous manifesto for the student paper. Pammy, who was meant to be stealthy, falls into bed with Monty, a gentle football player who is the one boy on campus able to follow her argument. The comedy of their courtship is a reliable pleasure.
The engine of all three is Dahlia, an actress who played Miranda in a dreary freshman Tempest and wanted to play Prospero instead. She is magnetic and erratic, with a talent for unnerving every adult in the room, and Irma’s love for her is the rawest feeling in the book. Shakespeare’s island runs underneath the whole novel. There is a wedding on an island, a magician figure who stage-manages his friends, and an ending that reads Prospero’s farewell as a plea for mercy.
The trouble is that Dahlia, the most dramatic person in The Brightness by Chad Harbach, spends most of the novel offstage. Her story reaches the others by text message, podcast and rumour, and the reader learns her biggest decisions secondhand. Perhaps that is the point: everyone gets Dahlia at one remove. But the device keeps the reader from her at exactly the moments the book wants its grief to land.
A Wedding Where Everyone Makes a Mistake
The second part takes Pella to Block Island as maid of honour at the wedding of Owen, a now-famous novelist and her late father’s last lover. Here Harbach becomes a comedian of manners. The groom’s diminutive, gin-scented grandfather propositions her in the courtyard. A sister-in-law has chosen bridesmaid dresses in the green of hospital scrubs. Pella spends a thousand dollars on a vintage silk dress for the rehearsal dinner only to find it is a family fish fry. Then she watches her fiancé laugh, properly, for the first time in months, at a Brooklyn brewer pouring him a dark beer.
These chapters are alive with detail, but they run on, and they end on a night of misjudgments so neatly synchronised that it feels engineered. The Brightness by Chad Harbach has a soft spot for coincidence. Characters keep turning up in exactly the wrong bedroom, or at the one café table where the wrong friend is sitting. Two figures who matter a great deal once Pella reaches New York also take a long time to become people. A glamorous critic stays a type until his mother appears. An old school rival swings from adoring to vindictive between one page and the next.
Where Chad Harbach Finds His Best Writing
The mother is the novel’s great late discovery. She is a stroke-damaged, chain-smoking artist who was once a heroine of second-wave feminism, living out her days in a mouse-ridden house upstate. Pella becomes obsessed with her old experimental films, and Harbach’s descriptions of them are the best writing in the book. In one, a woman films her own small son on a kitchen floor for two hours. Another, unseen for decades, holds a secret that reframes a whole family. These pages are patient, exact and quietly devastating. Through her, the novel finally opens a door its campus chapters only knock on: what it cost the women of an earlier generation to make art at all, and how little of that work survived them.
The grief that dominates the fourth part is written with equal restraint. One character loses her balance entirely, and Harbach follows her through panic attacks, therapy, a reluctant prescription and a reckoning with the faith she thought she had left behind. It is the strongest stretch in The Brightness by Chad Harbach, and it earns the gentle final chapters. Readers should know that the novel’s sex is frequent and explicit, and that it deals in suicide, drug-facilitated assault, depression and abortion without flinching.
The Fifteen-Year Wait for Chad Harbach
Harbach, who earned an MFA at the University of Virginia, made his name with The Art of Fielding in 2011. It landed on the New York Times list of the year’s best books and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, an unusual double for a debut about a college shortstop. A long silence followed, broken by editing work rather than fiction, and The Brightness by Chad Harbach is the first new novel since.
It is dedicated to his son, and it opens with a song from The Tempest about living merrily under the blossom on the bough. That fits a book that ends under a flowering tree in a Wisconsin backyard, and a writer who seems more interested now in how people keep going than in how they win.
After the Last Page
This is a novel to argue about, and a book club will find plenty to fight over: whether the prank was brave or cruel, whether romance is the enemy of friendship, whether Pella’s drift is a failure or a freedom. It is too long by a wide margin, and its plotting depends on luck. But its people are vivid and its sympathy is wide, and The Brightness by Chad Harbach is at its best when it simply lets two friends talk, disagree and come back to each other.
Readers who like the frank, funny account of female desire in All Fours by Miranda July will find a cousin here. So will those who loved the creative partnership, and the resentment of who gets credit, in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. Anyone new to Westish could start with The Art of Fielding, though The Brightness by Chad Harbach stands on its own. This review is based on an uncorrected galley, and some wording may change in the finished edition. What will not change is the image it leaves: two friends on their backs in the grass, looking up into the light of whatever comes next.