There were some inspired moments of academic satire here, but the book overall felt too effortful. It's difficult to do this genre exceptionally well, but it doesn't seem that difficult to do it in a readable and benignly amusing style. Since authors of books like these know their audience is primarily made up of people who will "get" academic satire (i.e., academics), they merely have to pepper otherwise uninteresting narratives with witty barbs about university life, its oddities and its eccentrics. Gordon does this well enough, but it feels workmanlike.

Characters were underdeveloped; plot was fairly nonexistent and ended with a (very odd) whimper. The book suffers from the same problem that plagues the main character, a failed author: "Her publisher packaged the books as a trilogy ... which was duly hailed as 'acid,' 'biting,' and 'caustic.' ... [Later] she found she'd lost access to whatever capacity it was that had called forth all those low-pH adjectives." It Will Come to Me is far from biting; instead, it offers a gummy nibble. ( )

Liked the book. Liked the whole issue of a university. Very tongue in cheek.

Ben and Ruth have been married a long time - he's a somewhat discontented philosophy professor and she is/was a writer. They are at a college in Texas where the students are too well-behaved and all looks good from the outside. Ruth drinks too much at functions and bitingly observant of faculty families and students. She's quite funny - Ben is tolerant of all of this and together they bumble along and try to cope with their missing son, Isaac. Isaac left school and home in high school and has been living on the streest. Their only contact with him is through a a shady therapist who always lets them down. I enjoyed all the intrigue of the academic world - very funny scenes. The ending was just plain weird - it came out of nowhere, made no sense to me. ( )

A punchy novel about the lives of a philosophy professor and his wife in the world of academia, It Will Come to Me had me at many points literally laughing out loud. I can't count the number of times I interrupted a friend's studying in order to read aloud to him a particularly funny or accurate portrayal of life in the world of professional philosophy, or the types of people who inhabit the unversity world. The book is heavily character-driven, with a plot that is almost an after-thought. The novel's strength lies in the portrayal of the psychological lives of the main characters and the honest recounting of the relationship of Ben & Ruth. The book's weakness is the afore-mentioned plot, the culmination of which I found particularly abrupt and more disturbing than satisfying. I nonetheless greatly enjoyed this book, and have already passed it on to a friend to read. ( )