The campus novel. It’s a genre that evokes ivy-covered buildings, mysterious cliques, sometimes murder. And it’s a phrase that seems to be splashed over an overwhelming amount of marketing. So many college-set novels are sworn to be the “new Secret History" (disclaimer: they never are), relying on the nostalgia-infused dark academia that we’re all familiar with.
Grace Murray’s Blank Canvas doesn’t try to do this. Charlotte, a student at a small liberal arts campus in upstate New York, begins her final year with the lie that her father died over the summer. Despite being a coming-of-age tale, it lacks that sentimentality. Murray’s writing style is sharper, more disengaged; although she frequently acknowledges the act of freezing a moment in time to look back on as a happy memory, we as a readership feel none of this. Charlotte’s lie to her college counterparts is one that earns her both friends and a new relationship through sympathy, and it’s something you know from the offset will inevitably catch up with her.
The reading experience feels slightly numbing. Murray’s tone is reminiscent of a current trend in literature for a certain detached malaise in narration around female protagonists (think Anika Jade Levy’s Flat Earth, which I thoroughly enjoyed) and Charlotte’s college experience exemplifies this. Her love interest, Katarina, complains of knowing nothing about her – and this isn’t something only she faces; we do as well. This isn’t to say that the writing falls flat, though; there are multiple instances, including a scene centred around ins-and-outs lists at a college party, that feel witty, current and give the book a real, spiky levity.
The novel’s emotion, then, comes from the nail-biting and unavoidable reveal, set in a sun-soaked Italy, to Charlotte’s peers that her father is in fact alive. The interactions between the two show a tenderness and complexity that mark a stark contrast to the rest of Murray’s narration; his knowledge that Charlotte is ashamed of him, and the secret behind the breakdown of their relationship, is all dealt with deftly and poignantly. The novel doesn’t shy away from questioning how far the bounds of familial love and loyalty can go, and this is where it really shines.
