Benefit

Siobhan Phillips, 1978-

Book - 2022

"Laura, a brilliant student and promising scholar, escapes from her small town, working class background to join the ranks of the academic elite on a Weatherfield scholarship to Oxford University. She enthusiastically throws herself into her schoolwork, yet she is never able to escape a feeling of unease and dislocation among the anointed "best and brightest" of her generation. Years later, back in the U.S. with a Ph.D. in Henry James studies, she loses her job as an adjunct professor and reconnects with the Weatherfield Foundation. Commissioned to write a history for their gala reunion, she becomes obsessed by the Gilded Age origins of the Weatherfield fortune, rooted in the exploitation and misery of sugar production. As sh...e is lured back into abandoned friendships within the glimmering group, she discovers hidden aspects of herself and others that point the way to a terrifying freedom. BENEFIT is a gripping coming-of-age story that offers a withering critique of American meritocracy"--

Saved in:

1st Floor Show me where

FICTION/Phillips Siobhan
1 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
1st Floor FICTION/Phillips Siobhan Checked In
Subjects
Genres
Novels
Published
New York : Bellevue Literary Press 2022.
Language
English
Main Author
Siobhan Phillips, 1978- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
315 pages ; 21 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN
9781942658993
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

When Laura is summarily dismissed from her teaching position, she finds herself adrift. Having spent years dedicated to literature, she is uncertain how or if academia still fits into her life. Left with no steady income, Laura returns to her hometown to live with her mother and to find work and is soon approached by an old friend, Heather, for a writing project. A decade earlier, Heather and Laura studied at Oxford as recipients of the prominent Weatherfield Foundation fellowship. Now a successful businesswoman on Weatherfield's board, Heather hires Laura to write a historical essay for the foundation's upcoming gala. Laura begins her research and promptly uncovers the problematic roots of Weatherfield's history, setting her on a path to reconnecting with and comparing herself to former fellows. There's acclaimed writer Justin, medical student turned professor Greta, and enigmatic Mark. As Laura's career prospects grow increasingly murky, she must confront the divide between present truths and past perceptions. Phillips' assured debut novel blends a complex journey of personal realizations with insights into the dark side of ambition and power.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In Phillips's incisive if plodding debut, a stalled literature scholar pulls back the veil on university hierarchies and social privilege. Laura Graham, after a long history of rejection, is an adjunct professor with a CV that includes a Weatherfield fellowship at Oxford University. After she loses her job and watches a peer rise in the ranks, Laura second-guesses the value of life in academia. She reconnects with Heather, a friend from Weatherfield who encourages her to write a commemorative essay explaining the history of Ennis Weatherfield to be distributed to guests at a centennial gala. Laura accepts, and the job fuels her investigations of the Weatherfield foundation, which uncovers previously unknown histories of its founders, one of whom floundered at Oxford and paid others to do his work. Though there is too much backstory on Laura's own life, with long chapters on her childhood and friendship with a colleague, Phillips succeeds at capturing the paranoia and peculiarities of academic politics, which tend to favor those already at an advantage. It's a little bumpy, but devotees of the campus novel may want to take a look. (Apr.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

DEBUT A Rhodes Scholar with advanced degrees from Yale and the University of East Anglia, Phillips purveys an authoritative insider's perspective on academia and its social impact with the story of an at-loose-ends adjunct professor who attended Oxford on a Rhodes-like Weatherfield fellowship. Socially awkward and lacking a fancy pedigree, Laura felt out of place among her Weatherfield cohorts, who have gone on to success a decade later as she flounders, with both her job and her marriage out the window. A Weatherfield friend--but is she really a friend?--offers Laura work writing a history of the Weatherfield Foundation for its centennial, and Laura discovers ugly truths about the foundation's roots in the exploitative sugar industry even as she reconnects with other breezily assured Weatherfield fellows. Lacquered with details of Laura's struggles and her Weatherfield experiences, then and now, the narrative can initially feel slow. But Phillips is a smooth, steady storyteller, and the backstory connects directly to her portrait of academia as both reflecting and driving social inequities. VERDICT A smart, thoughtful read, occasionally needing patience; the socially engaged and younger readers facing the issues Phillips examines will especially enjoy.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A struggling American academic reluctantly reunites with members of her Oxford graduate-fellowship cohort. Laura Graham's life is not going well in the fall of 2011: She wasn't rehired for her adjunct teaching position at a women's college near Boston, hasn't found a permanent tenure-track position, and is stalled on an essay she's writing about Henry James. Strapped for money, she moves back home with her mother and takes a contract job writing the history of the Weatherfield Foundation, which sponsored the Oxford fellowship for "students of promise and ambition" she'd won 10 years earlier. Working on this essay, which will be used as part of a celebration of the foundation, takes Laura on two different journeys: First, she embarks on a historical excavation of the sugar business that created the fortune behind the prestigious fellowships, including its involvement in slavery, war, and exploitation; and second, she takes a number of trips around New England to meet up with the former members of her fellowship cohort, all much more successful than her, if also intolerably shallow. Author Phillips was a Rhodes scholar; her depictions of Laura's research, social life, and failed job search highlight the toxicity and ethical gaps that underlie much of modern academia and philanthropy. The novel plays with structure and style, which slows the momentum of the narrative considerably at first. The second half of the novel, in which Laura begins to confront the expectations and falsity of the foundation's work and her friends, is more absorbing in its forcefulness. An uneven debut novel with striking social commentary. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.