THE WAY OUT

The late Argentine writer and Princeton professor continues his Emilio Renzi cycle of novels.

Renzi, an investigator-turned-novelist, returns as a visiting professor of literature at a leafy college in New Jersey while researching the Argentina-born British novelist W.H. Hudson. There he meets Ida Brown, a combative academic superstar who imagines herself outside the system while actually being the system: “Her salary was a state secret,” writes Piglia, “but it was said that they raised it every six months and that her sole condition was that she must earn one hundred dollars more than the highest-paid male (that’s not what she called them) in her profession.” Ida is working on Joseph Conrad, a friend of Hudson’s, and warns Renzi to stay away from her intellectual territory. Naturally, they fall into bed together, hiding their tryst by publicly pretending that nothing is going on. Everything comes full circle: Renzi is “interested in writers who were tied to some double identity, bound up in two languages and two traditions,” just as he himself is—and as Ida is, and the Russian widow across the hall, and other players in the novel. Things take an unanticipated bad turn when Ida dies, the victim of a letter bomb, which brings out the investigator in Renzi. He himself comes under suspicion, grilled by detectives, one of whom tells him grimly, “Nothing is irrelevant under these circumstances.” Whodunit? Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent figures in a sidelong way while the perp is a failed scholar of Dostoyevsky-an cast whom Renzi visits in prison: “When he moved, his footsteps clinked with a gloomy sound; he was detained, and for the first time the word took on its full meaning for me.” It’s all very bookish. The resolution of the story is nicely indefinite, though Piglia’s appropriation of the Unabomber and his manifesto seems a touch obvious, as are the faint echoes of Stieg Larsson.

An offbeat take on the campus novel, full of sex, intrigue, and marginalia.