Academia is Hell

And so is reading RF Kuang's Katabasis

Photo by Rita Chou on Unsplash

Hi! Welcome (or welcome back) to Leave It (Un) Read, the newsletter that descends into the Underworld of overhyped literary phenomena.

Today, we’re returning to the subject of RF Kuang, because I recently read her latest and I might as well get it down while it’s relatively fresh in my mind. Sorry, girl. I’ll get to someone else next time.

I’m here to bury Katabasis, RF Kuang’s garbled and shallow return to the theme of ‘dark academia’ she so lucratively explored in Babel.

Now, I think Babel was garbage:

Katabasis is both better and worse.

I feel awful saying this about the works of RF Kuang, because it’s genuinely great to see someone win critical acclaim and commercial success writing unabashedly ambitious, nerdy genre fiction. It’s particularly great to see her break out of the boxes in which traditional publishing tends to put women – especially women of colour – and tackle themes of more quote-unquote general interest, like academic abuse.

If only she could. You know. Write.

So, as before, let’s provide a spoiler-free plot summary and chat a little about the critical reception and key themes of this here novel. All signposted in ponderous and dubiously-translated Greek, in homage to the original.

Sýnopsi

Katabasis is a 2025 novel by RF Kuang. It is set in the 1980s – yes, another historical novel, yes, not that the setting’s relevant in any way – about two PhD students in the Department of ‘Analytic Magick’ at Cambridge, Alice Law and Peter Murdoch. Their brilliant, demanding, “difficult” advisor has died, taking with him their academic prospects, and they both decide to descend to Hell to bring him back. To do this, they have to put aside their rivalry and the paranoid competitiveness encouraged by the academe (and specifically their advisor) and work together as a team. And perhaps become something more dot dot dot.

Sounds promising, right? RF Kuang’s concepts always sound promising.

If only, again, she could write.

Kritiki

As did Babel, Katabasis debuted at the top of the New York Times Bestseller list. Kirkus Reviews called it ‘a learned, literary manifesto on academia – and its darkness.’ The terminally easily-impressed Guardian called it ‘a celebration of “the acrobatics of thought.”’ Even more embarrassingly, the New York Times called her sentences ‘delicious’, her insights ‘well-earned and deeply affecting’. In the coup de grace, the NYT claimed that RF Kuang was ‘also funny’.

Uh-huh. I’ll show you some excerpts of the work in question, and you can judge for yourselves.

There were dissenting voices: the Washington Post called it ‘a bloated, tedious epic’, Slate had disappointed words likening passages to those from a teenager’s diary; and the Irish Times thought it was a bore.

Moreover, even among the serried ranks of the Army of Kuang, dissent was brewing. Enough to prompt this slightly touchy response from a loyalist:

And if you, dear reader, are one of the RF Kuang apostles who accuses her detractors of anti-intellectualism... no. No, this book is not intellectual. RF Kuang’s fiction is not intellectual. Stick around and I’ll show you why I say that.

But before I do that, let’s talk about what I actually liked about the book. Because I did like some things. Well, three things. I liked three things. With caveats. We’ll get there.

Épainos

Okay, things I liked. Don’t worry, the list is short.

Fóros Timis

Good Thing one: Peter is a logician and Alice and Peter bring up paradoxes and mathematical logic quite a bit. This is not the thing I liked. You’ll see why. But early-ish in their journey through Hell, Alice and Peter encounter eccentrics who baffle them - and are ultimately baffled by them - using logical paradoxes and conundrums. The eccentrics are extremely reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. And Carroll was, himself, a logician of some repute. You can see that influence in his most famous works, in fact. So it is a nice little homage to give this book’s Hell - described by Peter as ‘a campus’ - the air of a Carroll book (and of course, peep the name of the protagonist).

Protagonistís

Good Thing Two: Alice Law. The protagonist of Katabasis is a neurotic, paranoid, wildly competitive teacher’s pet riddled with internalised misogyny.

“Other students recoiled when Alice revealed who her advisor was, and she observed their fear with an immodest thrill. Though she would never admit it, the idea of working with someone dangerous excited her. Alice had dazzled her way through years of higher education by being a teacher’s pet; by miraculously succeeding where others had failed. She relished the thought that her advisor might be harsh, impatient, even cruel to others— for that made his attentions to her worth all the more. She liked being the exception to the rule. Favoritism was well and fine if she was the favorite.

Or:

“She liked dazzling them all at conferences with her professionalism and poise; her pencil skirts and clacking heels. She snickered wryly at the lewd jokes the old guard made, and shot down anyone who came on to her. “Don’t try with Alice.” She once overheard Professor Grimes saying this to a younger man who had been smiling at her all night. “She cares too much about the work.” She rejoiced privately over this compliment for days. He took her seriously. He thought she cared too much about her work! She thought she’d learned to inhabit the impossible ideal: the girl who was eminently fuckable but unreachable, and therefore virtuous and perfect. The girl who was everything all at once. It was the waning days of second-wave feminism, and all the girls in Alice’s generation were so tired of being told they’d been born to be raped, oppressed, silenced. Surely this was not the entire picture; surely there was some power in their sex. Alice was both attractive and restrained, and this made her feel superior, even as she witnessed Professor Grimes disappearing into hotel rooms with other women from the conference. Alice was different from them. They were wives in the making, and she was a magician.

She is incapable of trusting anyone - unsurprisingly, as she repeatedly shows herself as being unworthy of trust. She is a serial betrayer and straightforwardly an awful person. She also has the charm and charisma of the stale bread she eats for sustenance. We’re told that she’s smart, but the only evidence we’re provided (in Peter’s infodumpy internal monologue) of her amazing mind is one-hit-of-the-bong thought bubbles like ‘Do pets know they’re going to die?’ Behold:

“And there was Alice. Alice Law. How many nights during that first year did he bike home long after midnight, giddy with the memory of her laughter? Peter had never known anyone like her— prickly, stubborn, ridiculous Alice. She had an underdog’s persistence, an artist’s creativity, and best of all she thought so differently from everyone he’d trained with at Oxford. Perhaps it was the American influence (Peter had never been to America but his father had led him to believe it was a land of iconoclasts), or perhaps it was Alice’s off-kilter sensibilities, but something about her mind was— well, rhizomatic was the best way he could describe it. She didn’t think in straight lines; she was always zigzagging outward. She was always wondering how unrelated disciplines might speak to one another, or dredging up random shit from archives no one had ever heard of. Can you imagine a world without memory? she would ask. Can we form meaningful relationships if we have the memories of goldfish? Does your pet know that they will one day die? Does teleportation equal death? Now suppose you do think teleportation is death— if you woke up, and your spouse professed they had been teleported from one side of the bed to another, would you mourn them? Never before had he met a thinker whose thoughts spiraled out into places he could not easily follow. He so loved watching her think out loud, hearing her fragmented thoughts spin into complete arguments, seeing her eyes dart around a point in space he could not see.

It wasn’t just that she was brilliant. Everyone around him was brilliant; brilliance here was boring. Alice was a challenge. Alice kept him on his toes. Watch out for that one, Professor Grimes told him over tea at the faculty club. She’ll either flame out early, or she’ll win a Nobel.”

Thanks, Peter! This almost distracts me from the fact that what we are shown, repeatedly, is a bitchy paranoiac goblin whose only academic merit is the willingness to knife you if she thought it would get her a half-grade improvement.

And as a supporter of women’s rights and women’s wrongs, I thoroughly approve. Let! Women! Suck! Of course it would be nice if her character were revealed to us gradually through words and deeds, rather than one wall of text at a time, but baby steps, you know? After the blinking cipher of Robin Swift, the protagonist of Babel, it’s nice to see a recognisable attempt at a coherent psychological construct. Well done, Rebecca. Now, we’re asked to invest in the romance and happy ending of this abject wretch, so we sit back in anticipation of a passel of growth and redemption. Which, oh dear. We’ll get there.

Kalá Enimeroménoi

Good Thing Three: RF Kuang is at her best when she’s nerding out about a cool thing she found out about. The best bits of Babel, by a country mile, are the fun etymological tidbits scattered through the novel. The best bits of Katabasis, by far, are the fun bits of geometry, or logical paradoxes, she’s found. Of course, there’s a flipside, a huge one. We’ll get there.

Eláttomatas

Now, as to what I didn’t like. Oh, brother. Where to start.

Well, let’s start with some specific issues with this book, before talking about some recurring themes with RF Kuang’s work.

Erotiki Istoria

Alice, as I have mentioned above, is highkey a monster. Which makes her an entertaining main character in lots of ways, but also makes it unbelievably jarring when her love story is initially framed as a cutesy, tropey, Ali-Hazelwood-esque rivals-to-lovers story of the klutzy girl pining on the bleachers for the hot boy whom everyone loves ESPECIALLY THAT BITCH BELINDA WHOM RF KUANG CALLS AN ENGLISH ROSE. TWICE¹. It’s very creepy to read about the tee-hee whoops-that’s-my-morning-wood-poking-you-in-the-leg-oh-noes aw-shucks romance between some golden retriever and the tightly wound, snarling pitbull who is the protagonist.

Lýsis

Speaking of the protagonist... well, without spoilers, let’s just say that she gets a series of wins that she has done absolutely bugger-all to deserve. Not through growth, not through development, not through visibly putting someone else above her own interests, nothing. She gets deus ex machina after deus ex machina, to the point that even she protests feebly at all this generosity. Well, I say ‘she’. I mean that a beta or a developmental editor must have deferentially suggested to RF Kuang that people (in, I remind you, Hell) are being awfully nice to her horrible protagonist for literally no reason. And RF Kuang, instead of writing some growth for her protagonist, simply shrugged her shoulders and wrote ‘Don’t argue. Accept it.’ Ostensibly as advice to the protagonist, but really as an instruction to the reader. Take what you’re given, pleb.

And it’s OK. I don’t need all my fiction to come tied up in a nice moralistic bow. But it’s still very weird and narratively unsatisfying for all the issues in the book to be resolved, one after the other, because someone shows up and chucks the protagonist a lifeline at exactly the right time.

Anyway, let’s talk about common criticisms of RF Kuang’s oeuvre in general.

Ekthesi

Criticism One: RF Kuang tells, rather than shows.

This is a classic criticism, and achingly true of Kuang’s writing. We are told Alice and Peter are smart. We are told their fearsome advisor is smart. We are told of their internal struggles (physical and mental). We are told in one wall of text that one character has always been in love with the other, and are meant to accept that in lieu of anything we are shown about their dynamic. We are told these things in big descriptive paragraphs rather than being drip-fed a gradual accumulation of events that would allow us to come to a conclusion about these characters ourselves. This is a particular problem with the love story, because - without spoiling anything - the book resolves itself with what is more or less The Power Of Love. And if The Power Of Love is going to defeat the forces of literal Hell, Rebecca, I need you to attempt to make me feel it instead of just directing me to whatever the prosecution stipulates.

I will say, however, that I do think RF Kuang is trying to show Alice Law’s (quite heinous!) character as well as tell it to us. An attempt has been made. Not a successful one, but still.

Katadekthikótis

Criticism Two: RF Kuang condescends to her audience because she thinks she’s smarter than they are.

Ouf, this one’s a doozy. Again, I actually think Katabasis is not as bad an offender as Babel, which insisted on telling you how to feel about every character, every event, and every historical personage mentioned in the book. For example, Babel-era Rebecca Kuang would have wallopped you over the head with intertextuality about the unwokeness of every. single. one. of the mathematicians or philosophers she cites. But she spares us this. Katabasis doesn’t bother telling you that Lewis Carroll and Dante had problematic involvements with young women, or that TS Eliot was an anti-Semite, or the many many ways in which Western accounts of Eastern religious texts repeat the sins of Colonialism. She spares us much extraneous moralising.

Now, there is still plenty of room for Katabasis to talk down to its audience. Every time RF Kuang introduces a mathematical or philosophical concept, for example, she has the temptation to lapse into the ‘BUCKLE UP CHUCKLEFUCKS WE ARE GOING TO DO A LEARN TODAY’ register of which she seems so terribly fond. She has the temptation...and she gives in. Every time. I’ll provide some examples of this in a bit.

Stans of RF Kuang typically respond to the latter accusation with ‘Well, what do you expect? She’s an academic.’ Stans of RF Kuang typically follow up this defence with an implication that RF Kuang’s detractors just don’t like dense works with lots of citations. It’s anti-intellectualism, they say, plain and simple. You just don’t like an academic style.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let’s talk a little about that ‘academic style’. In Katabasis, teeing up a meditation on how the lead couple’s relationship changed for the worse one summer, RF Kuang introduces an academic work thusly:

“That summer, the philosopher Derek Parfit published the very controversial Reasons and Persons...Reasons and Persons argues for a reductionist account of personal identity: that is to say, no special essence of personhood that remains stable across one’s lifetime.”

This is not an ‘academic style’. This is the ‘style’ of a high-schooler knocking back Red Bull as she hammers out a five paragraph essay. It is the ‘style’ of a Maid of Honour giving a wedding toast beginning with ‘Webster’s Dictionary defines ‘love’ as...’

In any competent piece of writing - whether academic or not - a guiding principle is intention. Why is any element of this text there? What does it contribute to the whole?
In an academic work, every citation needs to be in there for a reason. You’re setting up the literature to show how you contribute. You are providing weight to an argument. You are, perhaps, showing an opposing view for the purposes of academic rigour. Bibliography-padding is resolutely frowned upon.

What are RF Kuang’s citations adding to her work?

Plokí

The most obvious candidate answer, of course, is plot. Don’t we find out about all sorts of exciting paradoxes, mathematical and philosophical concepts? We do, we do, we do. We’re told about Pascal’s Wager, about Gabriel’s Horn, about the Law of Noncontradiction and the Law of the Excluded Middle, about the Liar’s Paradox and Zeno’s Paradox. They’re very cool.

Now if only any of them mattered. Like, at all.

I’ll explain. Pascal’s Wager is used to explain why PhD students fight for the vanishingly few academic jobs on offer instead of looking for lucrative industrial jobs, going on the market because what if, what if!

“Of course one could demand why anyone would put themselves through such nonsense in the first place. But here most academics’ thought processes mirrored the logic of Pascal’s Wager, whether they realized it or not. Pascal’s Wager said that you could choose to believe in God or not, but if you bet wrong on God and didn’t live as though he existed, you were missing out on the infinite wonder of Heaven. Similarly, you could choose to believe the job market would work out for you or not, but if you bet wrong and opted out of the cycle, you were missing out on the infinite miracles of the Life of the Mind. Now, like in the case of Heaven, no one in Alice’s generation had yet experienced this Miraculous Life of the Mind, but all their professors assured them it was possible and so they plodded along.”

The analogy that actually covers the situation Rebecca’s describing is the common or garden lottery. But I accept that’s not as sexy as Pascal’s Wager. (Which is not really applicable for a situation best summed up as ‘You Miss 100% of the Shots You Don’t Take).

Similarly:

1. Gabriel’s Horn is a geometric concept of a thing with infinite surface area but finite volume. Very cool. Except it’s never actually used to resolve or open up anything.

2. The Liar’s Paradox is brought up to show how brilliant a character is for cracking it – only we never see how she does it.

3. We do see how the protagonist ‘solves’ Zeno’s Paradox, and the solution is so stupid I actually cried.

Charaktér

Okay, so not plot, you say. Character. If the characters know all this cool shit, they must be smart. This is how RF Kuang demonstrates that they’re smart.

Again, no. If these Big Brane references only exist at the margins of the story - if they don’t matter - then we cannot infer anything about the characters from how they use (or misuse) them. And let’s be clear, Katabasis misapplies concepts at least as often as it uses them correctly.

Well, you say. Maybe RF Kuang wants her readers to go away and do their own research on these cool things she’s introducing.

Does she? Does she really? RF Kuang gives you a Cliff’s-Notes summary of the concept and salient details - right there in the text. In the case of Babel, she not only gives you that summary but also a potted biography of the relevant characters and a bullet-point list of Why That Person Was Problematic. RF Kuang is not whetting your appetite to learn more. She is, in fact, doing everything she can to prevent you from wandering away to do your own research. Everything you could want to know is right here! Don’t you dare form your own thoughts or opinions! What do you mean you want to order in thoughts? We’ve got thoughts at home!

In fact, one might argue that - so far from encouraging you to do your own research - RF Kuang wants to make sure you do nothing of the sort, because if you did do your own research, you might find that she’s misapplied nearly every single one of the Very Cool Concepts she’s dazzled you with.

Apáti

So that leaves one explanation. RF Kuang snows you with intellectual brand names as a form of bibliography-padding. She’s trying to dazzle you with the borrowed credibility of Eliot, of Godel, of Wittgenstein, of Euclid, of Russell, etc etc etc.

And it clearly works for many! RF Kuang gives you the feeling of being learned without the need to do any actual learning. Not Dark Academia, so much as ChatGPT Academia.

Antidrasi

I understand that quite a few people who loved RF Kuang’s earlier work are not sold on Katabasis. People who love the book are bewildered. Quite rightly - if you loved Babel, then presumably you were bought in to the RF Kuang Method? Some of RF Kuang’s worst habits (as I mention above) are actually dialled down in Katabasis compared to Babel. So what gives?

I think there’s a couple of things going on here.

1. One is that RF Kuang’s been gaining more mainstream fame, so she’s gaining more and more new readers. Readers who come to Kuang outside of BookTok, who come to Kuang without having been exposed to her style. With a wider audience comes more scrutiny and more criticism. That’s just how it is.

2. The other reason? Well, for the people who loved Babel and hated Katabasis? I suggest that you go back and re-read Babel. You may find that your taste has changed over the years.

Enallaktiki Lýsi

There are other, better, more thoughtful fantasies about minoritised identities and academic abuse. One such is Isaac Fellman’s knotty, rich The Two Doctors Gorski, which also features a young woman studying magic in a male-dominated English university, but which is more incisive than poor old RF Kuang is capable of imagining. Just a suggestion.

And if you do want an agonising meditation on the terrible toll that academia exacts, and the nature of a soul - well, we’re on Substack, so I suspect I already know the answer, but: have you ever heard of a novel called Stoner?

1. By the way, Babel also had a white girl who was called an English rose in the narration and whom the protagonist despised. Rebecca, what white girl hurt you?