BOOK REVIEW
Harvard's college of carnal knowledge

By Diane White, Globe Staff, 06/23/98

One of the premises of ''The Student Body,'' a beach-blanket thriller co-authored by four members of Harvard's class of 1986, is that some grown men - and some grown women, too - will pay large amounts of money to have carnal knowledge of real live Harvard students.

A prostitution ring run out of Harvard? Pass the smelling salts. ''Harvard is a big fantasy. We sell it to people who never came here, and to the ones who didn't get lucky while they were here, but now can afford the best,'' explains the evil Desiree, the ring's co-mastermind and - what else? - a Harvard Business School student.

Are there, in real life, people who daydream about sex for hire with somebody who has a pair of perfect SATs? There are weirder fantasies, certainly. But this has to be fiction. Everybody knows student prostitution would never get off the ground in Harvard Yard the way it did at Brown in the mid-1980s, when two students were busted for peddling Ivy League thrills. That case inspired the plot of ''The Student Body.''

Toni Isaacs, hard-hitting reporter for the Harvard Crimson and a knockout to boot (''large, slightly tilted eyes, smooth, velvety cocoa skin, ... full breasts,''), hears rumors of a student-run prostitution operation and sets out to investigate by applying for a position at Class Ring, an escort service so academically upscale it uses condoms packaged in crimson and emblazoned with the Harvard seal. Unfortunately, Toni is arrested on her very first investigative ''date.'' Fortunately, the bust occurs before she's asked to do anything explicitly sexual - not that she would have, even for the sake of a great story. Her subsequent humiliation before the Cambridge police, the university administration, and her bewildered parents only fuels Toni's zeal to expose Desiree's nefarious scheme.

Toni is pretty certain that it was a suspicious Desiree, whose real name Toni soon discovers is Dora Givens, who provided the tip that led to her arrest. Her journalistic instincts tell her there's something much bigger than prostitution afoot. She's right. The plot includes murder, kidnapping, blackmail, and grand-scale financial fraud, among other skulduggery. It also includes sex - lots of sex, of all sorts: straight, homosexual, bisexual, and voyeuristic, among other variations. Sex in stairwells. Sex in hotel rooms. Video sex. Film sex. A full-scale orgy in the Adams House swimming pool. You might think Harvard invented sex, the way these characters carry on.

''The Student Body'' is being promoted as a ''multicultural thriller.'' Toni's background is African-American and West Indian. Her roommate Consuelo Santana, called Chelo, is a Latina, a premed, and the only character who ever seems to find time to study. The cast includes, among others, Nguyen Van Thieu, a handsome Vietnamese-American; Didi Caron, a wealthy Cuban-American; Sterling Kwok, a scheming Harvard dean originally from Hong Kong. And there are a few WASPs, among them Cabot Winthrop, a social activist to whom Toni is drawn against her better judgment, and the mysterious Dayton Moore, a professor who teaches ''Sexuality and Social Institutions'' and writes book with titles such as ''Shame, Shame, Shame,'' and ''On Doing the Nasty.''

Harvard is really the main character in ''The Student Body,'' but it's not Harvard as it's often portrayed, a place where privileged white folks follow in the footsteps of their ancestors. This Harvard is multicultured and multicolored, a place where political correctness does daily battle with academic integrity. At this Harvard, scholarship students and the sons and daughters of the rich share a common struggle with the enormous weight of unrealistic expectations.

At one point a university administrator begs Toni to forget about exposing everything she's uncovered in her investigation and protect the reputation of the university, ''the dream of Harvard.''

''This isn't the center of the universe,'' she tells him. ''It's just a pretty good place to go to college.''

At another point, Moore tells Chelo that Harvard ''has the highest per-capita production of stress outside of Wall Street. ... Students, faculty, administration. There are more mentally ill people here than you might think, some resting quite comfortably in the seats of power. And that's not counting the Prozac poppers. From time to time you may hear about newsworthy disasters - suicides and the like. But those exceptional cases obscure the daily freaked-out state of a lot of ordinary Harvard types.''

It's fair to assume that the Harvard of ''The Student Body'' reflects the college experiences of the authors, a multicultural foursome, two men and two women, who write under the pen name of Jane Harvard. The book was six years in the making, according to a press release. The results don't read like a collaborative effort, which is very much to their credit. ''The Student Body'' isn't great literature, but it's a briskly paced thriller with an unusual set of characters, an irreverent view of Harvard, and, as noted, loads of sex. It has ''movie'' written all over it.

This story ran on page E01 of the Boston Globe on 06/23/98.
© 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.

 

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