Randy Boyagoda's Lords of Serendipity is one of those novels that earns its chaos. The premise sounds like a pitch: a Sri Lankan teen paying for WhatsApp tutoring from an Indian student at a mediocre American university; a statistician discovering a grade-fixing scheme that covers up a suicide; an AI chatbot named Puck replacing a nearly-finished PhD. But Boyagoda isn't stacking provocations for effect — he's mapping a system, and the system is the university. The novel's structural gambit is to treat the university not as a setting but as an antagonist. Every character's misfortune routes through the same institution: Devi's family mortgages itself to buy access to a world that may not want her; Jack's integrity is purchased into silence with paid administrative leave; Patricia loses her teaching post to a chatbot; Cham and Katrina get banned from campus for staging an unauthorized act of not-quite-protest. Boyagoda is disciplined about this — the comedy and the tragedy both arrive from the same source. What keeps the novel from collapsing under its own topical weight is the voice. Boyagoda is a professor of English at the University of Toronto, and he writes about academia with the particular venom of someone who genuinely loves what it's supposed to be. His jokes are sometimes bad — he knows this, and deploys the bad ones at himself — but the good ones cut: the interpretive excesses of English literature scholars, the humanities' martyrdom complex, the corporate logic that replaces everything with 'flatness and shine and more flatness and shine.' He wields his whimsy as cover for the incision. The most unexpected section — the Chinese takeover of a Sri Lankan university renamed Serendipity, after the island's colonial name Serendib — is where the novel earns its title and its most pointed argument. Colonial extraction has a new face; the mechanisms of soft power and institutional capture are continuous with earlier histories; a Chinese-funded astronomy program in Kurunegala is not categorically different from what Europeans and Chinese explorers once did when they 'found' the island. That Boyagoda makes this legible without making it schematic is the novel's real achievement. The weaknesses are structural. Too many things happen. The reviewer admits this directly, and they're right to — Boyagoda's gallery of characters is genuinely too large to fully inhabit in a single novel. Cham and Katrina's friendship-turned-feud deserves more room than it gets. The grade-fixing subplot resolves somewhat tidily. But these are the costs of Boyagoda's ambition: he wants the whole system, not a slice of it, and the sprawl is the point as much as it is a flaw. For readers who have been watching American universities hollow out in real time — defunded humanities, adjunctification, international students as revenue units, DEI theater alongside actual exploitation — this novel functions as a diagnostic. Boyagoda doesn't resolve the contradictions. He humanizes them, which is harder and more honest.
