It can be snide, sublime, cynical, penetrating, escapist, stark, cynical, delightful, and so forth. Wit follows the life of the meaningfully named Professor of English, Vivian Bearing. Bearing has dedicated her life to wit, specifically in the form of studying the Holy Sonnets of John Dunne, some of the most abstruse poems ever penned. Bearing is a representation of a human capacity rather than an actual person. She has nothing but wit, no friends, no family, no personal attachments, no life beyond academia.
Bearing is diagnosed with stage-four metastatic ovarian cancer, considered untreatable.
She elects to submit to a radically aggressive chemotherapy treatment espoused by a Dr. Kelekian. At this point Edson sets up an exceptionally effective analogy between medical and literary academic practice. The clinicism of Bearing's approach to Dunne, and to her students, is mirrored in Kelekian, and in his students. Edson draws her extended metaphor with great skill. Yet, as Professor Bearing is shoved forcefully into humanity by her pain and impending mortality, her relationship to wit becomes increasingly defined as escapist, irrelevant, and inhuman.