Fraternity by Benjamin Nugent

Review originally published August 6, 2020

This review was originally posted on Instagram on August 6, 2020.

Here’s a link to purchase Fraternity.¹

Julie, Jesse, and I have been waiting for Ben Nugent’s Fraternity for what feels like forever (side note: I can’t believe Julie and Jesse still haven’t met!! Fuck rona for keeping us apart!!). Most of the stories in the collection have been published previously in various magazines, so we had already read all but two of them. And I won’t lie, I was a little annoyed by that. Spending nearly $30 on a book I’ve basically already read...whatever. I don’t want to think that much about it, because the book itself is wonderful, and I don’t wanna get too hung up on the fact that I shoulda checked it out of the library. And I probably would have wanted it for my personal collection regardless. I was first introduced to Nugent’s work on The Paris Review podcast, where Jesse Eisenberg read the story “God” that kicks off this collection—so so good, highly recommend that you give it a listen.

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I’ve already seen a lot of really annoying responses to this book, all some variation of: “how novel and unexpected! Frat bros being deep! Whoa! How playful and groundbreaking!” Which is, to me, missing the point. All communities and private languages and rituals sound like complete idiocy to outsiders. Duh. Frat bros have depth and humanity in the same way that Republicans have depth in the same way that Twitter trolls have depth. Just because you don’t want to understand or have empathy with them doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to understand or empathize with. 

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Obviously I’m going to bring up Genevieve Sly Crane’s brilliant novel Sorority in this review. Sorority and Fraternity have the same form; both are interconnected short story collections that focus on one chapter of a Greek institution (Sorority is both more adventurous and innovative with the form, but I’ll save that for a different review). Also like Sorority, Fraternity both plays with (and suffers from) the fact that Greek life is already heavily mythologized.

There are beats you have to hit when writing about Greek life, it seems: to write about a frat, you gotta include dumb nicknames, beer and booze and plenty of casual sex, hazing, closeted gay guys, alumna who linger long past their glory days, sexual assault, drug abuse, and binge drinking. To write about sororities, you gotta include all of that too, but also eating disorders and abortions. 

The hard thing (as someone who was in a sorority, as someone who writes fiction about being in a sorority) is that all of those cliches are cliches for a reason; they aren’t too far from the truth. But I think this is where the short story does a disservice to the stories that Nugent wants to tell. The insidious truth (I think) about a lot of the darker sides of Greek life is that for many members, it’s just background noise. Whispered sexual assault allegations, rumors of drug abuse, gossip about eating disorders and legends of hazing—you‘ll always hear it, you can’t tune it out, but it takes on a static quality, until something happens to someone close to you. But by giving each issue the attention it deserves in the form of a short story, the book seems to sensationalize Greek life, even as it gets a lot right. Ultimately, I think a novel (rather than a short story collection) would be the better form for talking about Greek life, as then the narrator can slide through all the tropes and truisms, rather than assigning each one a story, which ends up feeling a bit like a topical sitcom where big issues are brought up and resolved in the space of an episode.

What Nugent gets right: the yearning, the desire to belong. But still, Fraternity misses something. It’s missing some heart—or maybe Stockholm syndrome or whatever dismissive name you can apply to “friendships you gotta pay for.” Nugent clearly feels very tenderly towards his subjects, but the relationship his characters have with each other is nearly consistently fraught. 

Occasionally character do achieve moments of what they believe to be understanding, only to have it ripped away from them. “God” ends with a particularly salient and beautiful paragraph about the pain of having brotherhood and intimacy silently revoked. In several stories, our frat bros think they have found intimacy and connection in sex, only to realize horrifically that their partner is not actually on the same page, not even close. “Cassiopeia” ends with perhaps the purest moment of connection in the collection, and “Basics” ends ambiguously, but with a hand outstretched, searching for connection. But neither of these stories focus on a friendship between frat bros. Frat bros are only brothers fleetingly.

In considering male tenderness, there are some obvious resonances with my review of The Topeka School—lots of stereotypes and truths about masculinity and vulnerability to consider here. But I don’t want to be too repetitive. So I’ll leave at this: I really enjoyed this collection, I wish it was longer, but ultimately, I’m still waiting for the Great American Greek Life Novel.

(But it’s not a Book Notes review if I don’t wax poetic about my own life.) I’m a little worried that I sound like a broken record. All of my reviews basically beg for the same things: I want intimacy, I want hope, I want friendship, I want community, I want love and tenderness that is found and expressed outside of the bedroom. Blah blah blah, y’all have heard me say it before. Maybe it’s because I’m at a time in my life where I feel very comfortable in my friendships. I didn’t have many friends in high school, but I found a real crew in college (and specifically in a sorority), and post-college, I met even more people that I love and feel real loyalty towards. I’m baseline happy in my personal life, which is strange given how much there is to be anxious about right now. I almost feel guilty saying it.

A while ago, pre-covid, a guy took me to task for expecting my literary fiction to show more moments of connection between characters. It was our second and last date. We were sitting in the only midtown Manhattan bar with $3 beers and free popcorn, and I was a lil drunk, which always makes me embarrassingly effusive. I was complaining about all the things you’ve heard me complain about before—that I want to read more books about friendship, more books that end hopefully (like I said: broken record). And in short, this kid told me that that’s not what serious literature is about—serious literature interrogates the human condition, which is full of misunderstandings and quiet misery and misfortune! To a certain degree, this guy was definitely just being condescending about the fact that I read a lot of book club fiction (I prolly got too hyped up in my glowing praise of Tana French for his highbrow tastes lmao). And I’m just like, I’m sorry that your life is so devoid of joy and love that you don’t see happiness and understanding as a serious human condition to be explored! That must really suck for you!

I spent so many years looking for fiction that affirmed that I wasn’t alone in my anxiety, in my sadness, in my fear and feelings of isolation. It’s not THAT weird that now that I’m doing alright, I want to read fiction where characters end up okay, or on a path to okay.

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