Randy Boyagoda, son of Sri Lankan immigrants and a professor of literature at the University of Toronto, grew up in the soon-to-be-annexed Territory of Mar-A-Lago North. He is a celebrated novelist and essayist, also a lifelong Catholic whose third book was a biography of Richard John Neuhaus. Similar to Neuhaus in the past, Boyagoda today remains living proof that religiously oriented public intellectuals are not extinct.
Still, a man who wears multiple hats can sometimes forget which one he is wearing. In 2024, Boyagoda published a column in the Toronto Star about being daunted by his new role as “advisor on civil discourse” to his university. To illustrate, he recalls being asked by “a person in healthcare … how to deal with anti-vaxxers … when they’re completely wrong about the science.” His advice, quoted in the column, was “to begin by not assuming they were wrong about everything.”
So far, so good. To be civil is to credit your antagonist with being right about something and to take it from there. The hope, writes Boyagoda, is that “More and more people will find the humility, and the fellow humanity in their interlocutors.” But then he turns sarcastic, quoting himself as saying anti-vaxxers were “likely wrong, probably wrong, mostly wrong, but maybe not completely wrong” (emphasis added).
With its four repetitions of “wrong,” this quip reads more like a parody of elite condescension to the brainwashed masses than a shining example of civility held up to Toronto’s good people. Indeed, it would fit right into Boyagoda’s new novel, Lords of Serendipity, a 352-page exercise in shooting satirical barbs into higher education’s already wounded body.
What distinguishes this campus novel from many others is its bi-national scope—chiefly set in Sri Lanka and the United States. Canada is mentioned only twice, which is odd given most of Boyagoda’s satirical barbs could just as well target Canadian universities. Even odder is the absence of certain ham-handed overcorrections imposed by the current U.S. president in a novel aimed at wokeness, cheating, and corruption within academia.
To be fair, most of Lords of Serendipity’s satirical barbs hit their targets. In Sri Lanka, these include barriers facing Devi, a studious but impoverished young woman who dreams of attending an elite Anglophone university. Her mother tries to bring her back down to earth with the belittling acronym “Ochpys” (Oxford-Cambridge-Harvard-Princeton-Yale-Stanford). But her father inflates his daughter’s hopes as ridiculously as he previously inflated his own.
In America, the barbs target two East Coast universities: the “barely ranked” Arcadia Tech and the highly ranked Haven, a “woodsy Gothic paradise.” At Arcadia Tech, an associate professor of statistics named Jack accepts a Sisyphean course load to keep his daughter Katrina at Haven. When Jack sees a severed pigeon wing on his office window ledge get blown off by wind and snatched mid-air by an eagle, he asks his students to calculate the odds. A lively discussion ensues, but two students tattle to the dean that their professor “made repeated references to graphic acts of animal cruelty,” which he “forced students to discuss.”
Meanwhile, at Haven, the annual Christmas performance of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is disrupted by cast members wrapped in black cloaks declaring themselves “THE LAST GENERATION OF THE ANTHROPOCENE” resisting a play that “PERPETUATES SPECIESIST, SEXIST, RACIST, ABLEIST, AGEIST, AND CHRISTIANIST IDEOLOGIES THAT ARE ALSO DEPLOYED IN SUPPORT OF SETTLER-COLONIAL ZIONIST APARTHEID FASCIST REGIMES.”
Mercifully, this disruption is disrupted when two cast members drop their cloaks and perform a scene from the play. To Jack’s delight, one rebel is his daughter Katrina (as Reynard the Fox) and the other is Cham, her wealthy Sri Lankan roommate (as Sir Gawain). Unlike Devi’s story, Cham’s privilege was not inherited but gained through tragic sacrifices by her parents—a narrative so beautifully written it stands out from the rest of the novel.
Devi, Katrina, and Cham are the most sympathetic characters, yet even they catch a few authorial barbs. Overall, Boyagoda skewers more characters than he spares, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. Satire works best when wielded by a master longbowman picking shots rather than a hail of arrows bouncing off advancing armor. Ideally, the satirist must have humility to see their own flaws alongside those of targets, aiming not at communities broadly but at sickness, morbidity, and stupidity that threaten them.
In recent decades, satire has dominated the space once filled by something far more generous—humor. As noted in Boyagoda’s Toronto Star column, we live in a “hard loud world” of diffuse anger seeking any outlet. Much of what passes for comedy is misfired satire lacking clear targets, humility, and humor; the term for this is snark, derived from Low German snarken, meaning to be irritable and bad-tempered.
Lords of Serendipity is too funny to be accused of snark. But just as Boyagoda quipped that anti-vaxxers are wrong in three ways out of four, he seems unable to resist practicing his archery on random targets. For example, when Jack asks the attractive associate dean (an old flame) about her day, she offers to “skip the latest about the ongoing student encampment around the Immunology Department’s dormouse glirarium.”
Googling glirarium, I learned it is “a terracotta container used for keeping edible dormice … considered a delicacy in the Roman Empire.” Designed to fatten dormice through “hibernation via darkness and confinement,” the vessel is perforated, polished internally, and sealed with a lid. Struck by its resemblance to elite American universities, I expected Boyagoda to deploy it meaningfully—yet he does nothing with it, just as he neglects dozens of other satirical bits. If they were dormice, they would starve.
My hope is that Boyagoda will deepen emotion in his next novel for two reasons: First, he excels at it, as demonstrated in Cham’s story. Second, emotion remains the key to humor—a truth Marcel Pagnol, the great comic filmmaker, captured succinctly: “Laughter is a human thing, a virtue belonging only to humanity and God, that perhaps God gave to humans as consolation for having made them intelligent.”
Lords of Serendipity: A Novel
by Randy Boyagoda
Mariner Books, 352 pp., $30
Martha Bayles is the author of Through a Screen Darkly: Popular Culture, Public Diplomacy, and America’s Image Abroad. She teaches at Boston College and is working on a book about informal speech norms in the digital age.