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 Jane Harvard, from left: Adiele, Sullivan, Melcher, and Singer. LESLIE BORDONARO/VILLARD |
Here's a sexy thriller about a prostitution ring at Harvard--with stimulating biotechnical sidelines--and a group of bright, vibrant, courageous undergraduates with great buns who staff or expose it. A fast-paced entertainment, The Student Body accurately portrays the multicultural world of many colleges today, and the topography of this one is Harvard's, bound to add interest for those familiar with the territory. Could such a thing have happened in the Adams House pool? one asks oneself. Why, of course. Sex abounds in these pages, all manner of sex, excluding no persuasions (yet, gentle reader, not likely to trigger heavy breathing). The Student Body, says the publisher naughtily, "gives new meaning to the idea of getting into Harvard."
What is most interesting about this multifaceted, orgasmic student body is that it has been imagined by a group of four, friends from the class of 1986. They set out to create a seamless tale and have done so, which may be an achievement unprecedented in letters. 
"We got together first for a week at Bennett's parents' summer home north of Chicago," says Faith Adiele, a visiting professor of English at Framingham State College. "We lined up four computers in a row. Bennett's mother brought us food." "That was in 1992," says Bennett Singer, executive editor of Time magazine's education program and sometime producer of PBS historical documentaries. "We thought we could finish the book in a week. It took half a decade."
At the end of the week they had a plot outline and some pages. The plot would be loosely based on the real-life exposé of a prostitution ring at Brown (if a two-woman enterprise can be called a "ring") that made the news during spring of their senior year.
After their beginning, they shot around computer disks and got together for working vacations. "Three of us did the writing. Bennett did the research and editing," says Adiele. "Each of the writers would be assigned a series of chapters. When the series was done, it got passed on to the next writer, who would add and subtract."
"Probably my father can tell which chapters I wrote, but some good friends who thought they could were wrong," says Julia Sullivan, director of communications at Cambridge College. On leave from a Ph.D. program at Rutgers, she has written other novels, musicals, and a screenplay. "Faith is good at characterization," she says. "We could count on Michael for social observation and humorous description. I'm good at exposition and plot. Bennett is a great tweaker. Our editor at Villard is Jonathan Karp, Brown '86. He was editor of the Brown Daily Herald when the real prostitution story broke, and he was helpful to us in many ways."
"It was fun," says Michael Melcher, a securities lawyer. "When you write together, you avoid the anxieties of solo authorship. It was at first an inspiring experience, then it became interesting and intense. We wanted to master the genre of the thriller but subvert it, mainly by not creating cardboard characters.
"Our whole generation has been misportrayed," adds Melcher. "We were driven to get our vision of our world out before someone else did and got it wrong. Our characters are not merely cynical, they have a yearning to do something meaningful, to find a way to have a valuable life."
The foursome has spent a weekend together drafting the plot of a sequel. The characters in the first book take on sex and biochemistry. In the next one, some of them graduate and tackle the worlds of big business and organized religion. All that's needed is a little encouragement.
~ Christopher Reed