ella and Irma, two classmates at Westish College, in Wisconsin, are the best of friends. Pella, a newly engaged divorcée and former wild child, has just graduated. Irma, several years younger, is a rising academic star, a scholarship student from a rural Catholic family, so unhip that her lack of touch is its own form of cool. Together, they’ve been in weekly independent-study sessions, reading authors such as Edith Wharton, for the past three years. But if they’re such good friends—why aren’t they talking? Sure, Pella is planning her friend Owen’s wedding, and Irma is gearing up for her senior year. But that doesn’t explain the sudden distance between them, or why the reclusive Irma made the uncharacteristic decision to go to the big parties that open Westish’s school year without telling Pella.
“The Brightness” (Little, Brown), Chad Harbach’s new novel, clocks in at nearly seven hundred pages, but the bulk of it follows Pella and Irma over the span of a few late-summer days in 2015. At Owen’s wedding, Pella’s engagement falls apart and her friendship with Irma seems to reach a breaking point. At Westish, Irma participates in a prank that is meant to draw awareness to sexual assault on campus. The rest of the book covers the subsequent nine months, in which the two women navigate the fallout of these events, Pella from New York and Irma from Westish, only to be reunited toward the end.