Adams Fall by Sean Desmond

I did not write yesterday (bad, Renee!) because after work, E and I went into San Francisco to attend the Harvard Club of San Francisco’s holiday party. Apparently, over 300 people were registered to attend, so I figured, given the odds, I would probably see one person I knew. Sure enough, I did see a familiar face, though it did not belong someone I had ever spoken to before. I had definitely seen him around campus though, and he looked exactly the same. I’m fairly sure he would have had no idea who I was, but E likes to push me a little and said, “Come on, just say hi. It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t know you, you’re the same year.” And I really wasn’t going to, but as he walked across the room, we made eye contact about ten feet apart, and I knew it would be more awkward then to not say something.

“You look familiar,” I said to him. He said, “Yeah, so do you.”

And then he asked me what I did for a living.

I’m not going to get into how much I hate that being the first thing a person asks when they meet you. As if it were the most important thing about a new acquaintance, that it could tell you anything at all about the person you have just met. (This results, for me, in the shy-person problem of not asking anything at all, which in the end is worse. People must think I’m unfriendly and snobbish. If I were not shy, I would come right out and ask them what their favorite book was.)

We spoke only briefly (he was not as interesting as he had seemed all those years ago), but he did ask me the quintessential Harvard question, “What house were you in?”

I lived in Adams House, and am quite proud of it. Especially around the holidays, when Adams House was, hands down, the best place to be. Only Adams House had a holiday party at the Master’s house with spiked eggnog and mulled cider. Only Adams House had an annual black-tie Winnie-the-Pooh reading at our holiday show, complete with Master Kiely as narrator and a classmate assigned to each role.

My love of Adams House prompted me to buy a copy of Adams Fall by Sean Desmond the minute it was published. Though Desmond was an Adams House resident only one year apart from me, I never knew him. However, when I found out the book was set entirely in Adams House’s B-Entry (where I lived for one year), I had to read it.

The book is not particularly great. It is a murder-mystery-suspense-psychothriller that doesn’t quite live up to all of its billing. But I didn’t care. Desmond capitalized on Adams House’s own ghost-and-myth-filled history to create a creepy backdrop for his story of a student’s descent into madness. Here's Amazon's review:

Harvard's Adams House has a checkered past--ghosts in the attic, shadowy tunnels under the basement, and a history of student suicides and murders. The present isn't much sunnier, especially for the nameless protagonist, a senior plagued by memories of his freshman roommate's death and haunted by a specter who's got a few scores to settle before he quits this earthly realm for good. Author Sean Desmond, a Harvard graduate, takes us deep inside the drug and spirit-ridden head of his main character, who's got girlfriend troubles as well as a thesis to finish, a guilty secret to hide, and a problem or two with reality. It doesn't endear us to this overprivileged twit, but it adds to the Gothic atmosphere, which is laid on with a heavy hand. The ghost from the past is a much more interesting figure. He's a vindictive playboy with charm that doesn't quite equal his prescience in choosing a target whose descent into madness--and maybe murder--is horrifyingly depicted.

Don’t you love it when books take place on familiar ground? We are so ready to enjoy the book and forgive the author’s foibles when we can move around in the book’s space as if we were there, as if we are walking with the characters, following their lives in our own house. I don’t care if the book was mediocre-- I was in it.

Adams Fall by Sean Desmond
(The paperback edition is titled Abandon, as is the movie that was based on this book.)

Tags: books Harvard Adams House Sean Desmond