Chad Harbach Returns to Westish After 15 Years With ‘The Brightness’
Fifteen years after the publication of The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach is returning to the same Midwestern college setting with a new novel, The Brightness. The book shifts the focus toward female friendship, campus politics, and the long shadow of his breakout success.
Chad Harbach is heading back to Westish College, the fictional Wisconsin campus that made him a literary sensation, with a new novel arriving in October from Little, Brown. Fifteen years after The Art of Fielding, Harbach says he has finished The Brightness, a sequel set at the same Midwestern school but built around a different social and emotional center.
The timing alone makes the book notable in publishing. Harbach’s first novel, published in 2011 after a 10-year gestation, became one of the most closely watched debuts of its moment. Its release drew major reviews and heavy industry attention, with reporting that followed the size of his advance, the competition among publishers, a planned HBO adaptation, and foreign rights sales. Harbach recalls the reaction as overwhelming but also draining, saying the experience was rewarding and difficult at once, and something he needed a long time to recover from.
That pressure helps explain why he initially questioned whether returning to Westish was a good idea at all. Harbach says he worried readers who loved The Art of Fielding would inevitably like any follow-up less. But he kept circling back to Pella Affenlight, one of the five central figures from the earlier novel, and found that her situation suggested a new book. At the end of The Art of Fielding, Pella is considering enrolling at Westish as an adult freshman after a failed marriage and years spent outside college life. Harbach says he was interested in what would happen to her after that point, imagining her as a talented but uncertain young woman trying to figure out what comes next.