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Web Exclusives:
Under the Ivy September
15, 2004: Aaah, summer reading: Mary Higgins Clark, John Grisham, and an intellectual conundrum starring two precocious Princeton humanities majors, naturally. The truth is that The Rule of Four, by Ian Caldwell ’98 and Dustin Thomason of Harvard, combines elements of both Clark – mystery and romance – with Grisham – suspense and highly complicated plotting – but overlays them with fine, literary-allusion-filled writing and an academic atmosphere that might well have been dreamed up by Princeton’s PR department. The four roommates around whom the plot unfolds are a molecular biology major who assigns astrophysical nicknames and “identified a new protein interaction in certain neuronal signaling pathways” for his senior thesis, a legacy who balances being president of Ivy Club with his economics studies and passion for Audrey Hepburn, a history major whose lifetime obsession is with an obscure Renaissance manuscript that has yet to be translated into English (thank goodness for that command of Latin, Greek, Italian, and ancient Genoese dialects!), and Tom, a sort of everyscholar who nonetheless also succumbs to the lure of the puzzling text – and has enough humanities knowledge to help solve several of the book’s mysteries. In the opening scene, the four play word games with Shakespeare magnets and exchange ripostes over vocabulary words and Tobias Smollett. The funny thing is, that opening scene drew me into the novel from the very beginning. Sad to say, I didn’t lounge about cracking wise references to Fitzgerald and Smollett with my roommates in Pyne Hall, but there was an intellectual vibrancy and wit to Princeton that the authors of Rule of Four capture. It’s hard to imagine these four super-accomplished young men sharing a single dorm room; yet I recall individual students (almost) just like them. Indeed, the book’s realistic depiction of Princeton threw me, a somewhat careless reader, into trouble on a few occasions. I spent much of the first portion of the book utterly confused by what seemed like the longest Friday night in the history of time – because, of course, I knew that the erstwhile Nude Olympics happened late at night, after the participants had a chance to get good and liquored up. I missed the book’s clear statement that Vincent Taft’s pivotal lecture would occur at 9 p.m., which would have helped me realize that Princeton’s once-premiere winter event had been bumped up (not to mention sobered up) a few hours, to sundown. My other anxiety occurred over the Princeton Easter tradition depicted in the book: a Good Friday lecture and Saturday midnight service at the chapel. I honestly found myself worrying: Did I go to Princeton for four years – not to mention edit the alumni magazine — and somehow miss this? I know I didn’t take any type of advantage of Princeton’s many cultural events, but surely I wasn’t that oblivious. My answer came near the end of the book. The culminating social event of the year, The Rule of Four would have it, is a fancy dress costume ball at Ivy Club. OK, social events I know, and this one doesn’t exist. But the clincher? The officers close down the party before midnight to encourage everyone to attend the chapel service. Now that’s fiction. Jane Martin ’89 is PAW's former editor-in-chief. You can reach her at paw@princeton.edu
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