‘Angels at the Gate’ dives into privilege, death and identity in academia

Leah Gavin is obsessed with fellow Rockhaven University sophomore Brantley Simms, a gregarious and entitled frat boy found dead at the bottom of the campus bell tower one fateful fall morning in 1986. Both students attend the fictional Tennessee university — a prestigious institution founded to “educate the sons of slave owners” — on the same academic scholarship. But they are more rivals than friends.

What fascinates Leah is the ease with which Brantley maneuvers through life. While she struggles to define her social role, Brantley fits in with their classmates in a way she never will. Because Leah is female.

Rockhaven has only admitted women for the last 20 years, and misogyny and patriarchy rule the school in Atlanta author Sheri Joseph’s fourth book “Angels at the Gate.” This deeply immersive coming-of-age serves up a compelling slice of dark academia that interrogates the complex ways gender roles intersect with class to impact privilege.

The story is told from Leah’s adult perspective as she reflects on her college years in a fluid and languorous first-person voyage through her memories. While unspooling her own search for identity in a Proustian flow of reminiscence, she recounts all she learned while uncovering Rockhaven’s secrets. Her goal is to determine if Brantley jumped, or if he was pushed.

The world Joseph constructs captures both a place and time when private institutions like Rockhaven served as a “last bastion of the Old South with its tendency toward asceticism and shame.” She paints a vivid visual of upperclassmen streaming past gothic spires dressed in flowing Oxford gowns. Eerily, Brantley is wearing his gown when his body is found. Leah believes this is too symbolic to be a coincidence but struggles to assign meaning.

Rockhaven is itself a distinctive character in the story, a stifling and cloistered institution where the girls exist to ameliorate the boys during a time when Leah admits “few of us (girls) knew to mind.” A healthy dose of 1980s nostalgia, from the inclusion of bands like The Cure and R.E.M. to the use of computer labs and floppy disks, slides a modern lens over a milieu centered on Shakespeare and the Classics.

Both the faculty and her classmates are content to accept the cause of Brantley’s death as a mysterious fall. But Leah, who comes from a disadvantaged background, needs to know what drove a boy with seemingly endless privilege to take his own life. Or, more disconcerting, is there a murderer in their midst?

She befriends his Gamma Chi fraternity brothers and former roommates to find out more, which is no simple task in a culture fixated on deflowering female purity. Although Leah is in a sorority, the few female friendships she invests in mainly exist to analyze male behavior. She works hard to cultivate her reputation as a “cool, confident, not-quite-a-girl friend” who gives no-nonsense advice and evades sexual entanglements.

Through the seven male characters who orbit Leah — seeking everything from girlfriend advice to a Shakespeare tutorial to lessons on how to kiss — Joseph does a compelling job of depicting the tense power struggle that builds when men view women as ancillary sex objects.

But it isn’t until she gets to know Brantley’s friend Quinn Cooper that Leah meets her match. Quinn is an antagonistic figure who glorifies date rape and has a reputation for “seducing virgins he pronounces as sluts the next day.” But, like Leah, he is determined to get to the bottom of Brantley’s death. If only Quinn would share what he knows instead of stringing her along in a cat-and-mouse game.

Joseph resurrects plenty of bygone behaviors that are presently received as problematic to construct an uncomfortable reality for Leah to maneuver through. One example is labeling the girls who hang out at Brantley’s fraternity “Gamma wenches.” Through Leah’s effusive explanation about how easy it is to earn the lowest social ranking for a female student at Rockhaven, the author aptly demonstrates how the scarcity of opportunity for women creates competition and breeds animosity among their ranks.

Second only to uncovering the cause of Brantley’s fall, Leah’s driving motivation throughout her college years is to avoid being perceived as a wench — even as her feelings for one of Brantley’s friends blossom. As one of her sorority sisters notes, remaining in the male “friend zone” is a tireless endeavor that is as consuming as a full-time job.

Sheri Joseph is a creative writing professor at Georgia State University who puts her literary prowess on dazzling display in this nostalgic work steeped in academia. She pulls from a vast assortment of classical sources to build her world and shape its context.

Of particular note are her chapter titles. The author has assembled a comprehensive collection of references that reinforce the link between the act of falling and a person’s demise. Two chapters are titled after lines from the Alfred Tennyson poem “The Eagle” about the experience of being on the precipice of falling. Other titles are pulled from poems by Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot and Robert Browning that grapple with similar contemplations. And throughout “Angels at the Gate,” there is an effusion of Shakespeare to reinforce the shared themes universally experienced by humans, regardless of time or place.

FICTION

“Angels at the Gate”

by Sheri Joseph