Cold Fusion: A Novel

An offbeat, funny and moving coming-of-age campus novel by a Yale professor and film actor (One Battle After Another, Marty Supreme) in the tradition of John Williams’s Stoner, Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys and Elif Batuman’s The Idiot.

It’s the start of another fall semester at a midwestern university in the 1990s. Arriving on the foliage-and-flannel-filled campus is an unusual, unnamed freshman. Grieving the recent death of his father, he lives in a hotel instead of a dorm, finds himself a...