Jaded

Jaded is a dark campus novel about desire, manipulation, marriage, art, revenge, and the dangerous imbalance between professors and students. It is set mostly at Kelsey College in New York in 1986, with long returns into the pasts of its three central characters: married professors Sam and Vera Ward, and the young woman who disrupts their twenty-year arrangement, Jade Harris.

Sam and Vera Ward are both professors at Kelsey. Sam teaches film; Vera is a painter and art professor. They have been married for about twenty years. Their marriage is intellectually intimate, aesthetically rich, and emotionally cruel. Long ago, after Vera lost interest in sex with Sam, she proposed what she calls an “experiment”: each academic year they would choose a young woman for Sam to sleep with. Vera would help select the girl, sometimes even help emotionally manage her, while Sam would take what he wanted sexually. They tell themselves this arrangement has preserved their marriage. Sam thinks the girls are “just girls,” temporary bodies with no real power over him. Vera thinks she is above ordinary jealousy.

At the beginning, they are preparing for the fall semester and looking for Sam’s next girl. Their rule is that the girl should be at least twenty, old enough not to be too fragile or likely to complain to the dean. At a faculty party, they discuss possible candidates. Sam is bored, vain, resentful of the college president, and full of contempt. Vera is detached, sensuous, observant, and drawn to the natural world. The novel immediately shows their bond: they are cruel to each other, amused by each other, dependent on each other, and convinced that their arrangement has not harmed them. Then Jade Harris knocks on their door.