Randy Boyagoda has buried the campus novel in its grave. The setting of Lords of Serendipity is not the ‘city of aquatint’ and ‘autumnal mists’ of Brideshead Revisited, nor is it brimming with the forbidden knowledge and drunken cabals of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. This modern university is much more mundane: ‘All flatness and shine.’

Overseas students settle for the brutalist architecture of a provincial American college, dreaming of taking their families to the West after graduation. Jack, a statistics professor, works overtime to send his daughter to a picturesque liberal arts school while he himself remains in a concrete block where colleagues forget about his existence. His friend Helen survives the budget cuts in the humanities by moving to an admin role and covering up a cheating scandal. Allard, a PhD student, runs a grade-selling business without anyone noticing for years. His mother Patricia is made redundant by an AI research bot. All flatness and shine.

And lies. The students cheat their professors and the professors cheat their peers. Data is fabricated. Fictional discoveries receive international grants and awards. ‘There is no statistical advantage to studying the humanities,’ one student remarks. Academe’s glutted belly is about to burst.

This is without a doubt the darkest of Boyagoda’s satirical novels to date, yet the tone is not exactly cynical. The novel is full of dreamers. Men and women look to the idea of the university not only as the pinnacle of the humanist project but also – even primarily – as a place of negotiation between parents’ plans and their children’s own desires. Patricia wants to rise above her lower-class upbringing. Devi wants to make her ambitious father proud. Allard wants to impress the father who never bothered to raise him. Jack pushes his daughter Katrina to go to his late wife’s old college. Katrina’s friend Cham lives in the shadow of her mother’s sacrifices to get her to a prestigious American university.

It is telling that the only genuinely redemptive scene in the novel has nothing to do with academic achievement. Ultimately, it’s the desire for reconciliation between mothers and daughters, sons and fathers that is Boyagoda’s true theme. His genius lies in having written a technically accomplished campus novel which is not really about the university after all, but rather about the breakdown and rebuilding of familial relationships. Lords of Serendipity is a far better novel for it.