Is The Incendiares a true image of contemporary campus life?

R.O. Kwon may have written the campus novel for the current generation - but if so we should despair. The characters in her novel may be in college but they are hardly college students; there's barely a word about courses, studies, reading, ideas - college seems to be a long series of drinking, parties, and posturing. The characters - even Will, who's on scholarship and supposedly waiting tables to make ends meet - seem to have unlimited cash (and time) when it comes to good times, travel, getaways, exotic drinks. OK so it's a dark and despairing view of college life, at least as lived by some. The essence of the plot - as we discern from the title and from a campus bombing described in the first chapter - is about two of the main characters, Phoebe (a former piano prodigy now wasting her time and her family's money in an expensive private college0 and Will (a former Bible student now an apostate) get drawn into a right-wing Xtian club run by the third main character John Leal - supposedly an activist who helped smuggle N Korean Xtians to safety and who for a time was imprisoned in an NK "gulag." If the characters are too dumb to smell a phony from a mile away, readers are not: It's painfully obvious to us that nobody should trust this guy, and his story about North Korea is obviously fake (my only doubt was whether he'd faked the story or Kwon was in over her depth - how could an imprisonment in NK of a US college student/dropout not be a major news story?). So where's the tension, the struggle? Will and Phoebe hook up w/ this group that makes increasingly bizarre demands on their time and commitment, and they just seem to go along w/ the flow. In other words, despite the sensationalism foreshadowed at the outset, the plot just bumbles along, Will and Phoebe go through various periods of estrangement, then they're back together, and then they join the cult together. There's no "collision of forces" to build tension, sorrow, and pity - the characters are branches, floating in the stream, carried from one event to another - with plenty of $ to bankroll their privileged campus lifestyle. We'll see what happens in the final third of the novel, but so far this feels like sensationalism sans sensation.