After all, I had not yet read the lush and rather sticky story of Cambridge life offered up by four Harvard graduates under the pseudonym Jane Harvard in the new novel The Student Body. Our intrepid heroine, Toni Isaacs, is a reporter for the Harvard Crimson with the chance to break open a prostitution ring involving students at the University, and in the process star in a number of excruciatingly safe sex scenes. This is Boogie Nights for Ivy League fetishists, without the ample charms of Marky Mark. But if this book were only about engorged Crimson manhood, it wouldn't be half the inspiring work of literature that it is. Its other charms are considerable, and they might yet keep Bill Bennett from turning his righteous wrath towards the Gomorrah on the Charles.
Closer examination reveals the moral subtext beneath the sweaty sheets.
Toni is continually agonizing over whether or not to toe the line set by the administration. On the one hand, she could expose a major conspiracy to test drugs on human beings, save a number of girls from lives of prostitution, become a media celebrity and an accomplished journalist in one stroke, and possibly assist in the arrest of a murderer. On the other hand, if she does so, there's a chance she might be expelled. Choose your friends carefully. And the only token evil member of a minority may have sex with teenage prostitutes, but gosh darn it, he tells Toni to do the right thing, and in the end, she respects him.