Review by Eddie Generous
From the opening of Ivy League by Candace Nola, it’s clear where the story’s going. Predictable, but the point of a story like Ivy League isn’t typically mystery or shock, it’s catharsis. And in catharsis, Ivy League deals, despite how brief and somewhat abrupt it is.
The characters are what you expect—at least, I got what I expected; I mean, fucking frat bros are frat bros. The table is set, almost as if planned for a wedding: name cards, room for unlucky dates, the unworrying disappearances of frat brothers after nights of partying. And there all along, like a stoic uncle and a busy but unseen grandmother, are the decent humans.
Lightning fast, wholly accessible, and reasonably rewarding, Ivy League is a nasty, single-sitting read of fairness in an unfair world…which segues pretty well into the bonus story: Rebirth.
Rebirth is a short and reads a bit like a fairy tale, now and then breaking into almost singsong prose, which works well and is to the story's benefit. This one offers a different catharsis, despite that pretty much the same people are getting it—I guess everybody is getting it, though in the end to a lesser degree than the similar but older assholes of Ivy League.
There’s no untrodden paths cut here, but that hardly matters. Nor does it matter that the conclusions are all but defined from the beginning. Nor does it matter that many of the edges are rough. Nor does it matter that no grey areas are presented. It’s the catharsis that counts here.
Together, these stories pair nicely, and vent some of that real-life steam that seems to billow more and more furiously as we all choke to keep billionaires on the grow. If nothing else, Ivy League is an iconoclast offering for a world that feels poised to burn away if we don’t start consuming endlessly ambitious capitalists rather than consuming the junk they tell us we need.
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