Mishti is a beautiful chemist Tom is a beautiful medieval and Renaissance historian and also Nell’s ex-boyfriend. There is Joan’s husband, Barry, the self-important and useless Associate Director of Columbia Undergraduate Residence Halls-less a threat to Nell than a man-shaped afterthought-and Nell's two best friends, Tom and Mishti, who, as students in good standing, still have access to the privilege of Joan’s presence, both enrolled as nondepartmental students in her class. “What isn’t for you?” The rest of Nell’s world is populated with Joan-adjacent players. “As with the old work, the new work is for you, Joan,” Nell writes. The novel itself is a series of journal entries, all addressed to her absent beloved. Now it is Nell’s mission, working alone in the exile of her Brooklyn apartment, to build “a poison that undoes itself.” Yet it is not the work that is at the heart of her obsession but her mentor, Dr.
Though once she’d been focused on oak trees, she is now consumed by the need to finish the dead girl’s project to “neutralize botanical toxins,” to combine the poison and its antidote. A tale of poison and obsession set amid the toxic halls of academe.Įxpelled from her graduate program in biological science after a lab-mate dies, a victim of the group's toxicological experiments, Nell Barber is left obsessed and unmoored.
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