Lords of Serendipity review: Boyagoda's campus satire hits where it hurts

Randy Boyagoda's new novel Lords of Serendipity takes direct aim at the corruption and corporatisation of higher education, and the Guardian's review calls the result "this propulsive, globe-trotting tale" that "brilliantly skewers" a sector the paper describes as "on the blink".

The Canadian author's book is, according to the review, "equal parts satire, dystopia and exposé". It tells the story of "all that's wrong, glitchy and broken" in academia. The setting spans Sri Lanka, the United States and Italy. The cast includes students, parents and professors, all of whom deal with what the review identifies as a common antagonist: the university itself.

The first character readers meet is Devi, a Sri Lankan teenager determined to win offers from what she calls "Ochpys" — her acronym for Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford.

How far will a family go for an elite offer?

Devi's family of modest means — her mother, father, maternal grandmother and two brothers — hire themselves out as mourners at funerals of the wealthy. Most of that money goes to Johannes, her tutor on WhatsApp. Devi does not know that Johannes is a hard-up Indian student at Arcadia Tech, an undistinguished university in the United States.

The irony is the engine of the plot: the family chasing elite admission pays a student from a non-elite institution, who himself needs the income.

What happens when the scandal breaks?

A second storyline follows Jack, a statistician at Arcadia Tech. He has taken on an additional teaching load to meet the fees of the elite college his daughter Katrina attends in New England. Jack then discovers a grade-fixing scheme aimed at, in the review's words, "flailing international students". The scheme is run by his teaching assistant, Allard Hamburger.

The institutional response is the novel's sharpest charge. Jack is left in disbelief when the university, rather than launching an inquiry into a scandal that has left one student dead by suicide, puts him on paid administrative leave — effectively, the review notes, to buy his silence.

The review does not spell out how the Italy thread of the plot resolves; the published extract ends with Jack's enforced leave. What it does make clear is the book's target: a system in which the wealthy buy advantage, institutions protect themselves, and the vulnerable — an Indian student scraping by, an international student driven to suicide — absorb the damage.

Boyagoda teaches at the University of Toronto and has published several previous novels; Lords of Serendipity appears positioned, per the review's headline, as "a campus satire for this moment of crisis". The question the book raises is practical as much as literary: what does it change for universities? On the evidence of the review, nothing yet — but it names the machinery of denial in fiction, and the Guardian's verdict suggests readers will recognise their own institutions in it.

The full review ran in the Guardian's books section on 3 November.