Campus Novels (#2)

    Back in 2024 I offered a list of sixty novels that take place in the groves of academe. The Groves of Academe is on the list and is mentioned in the post. Henry Mulcahy is a character in it, but we are not related. It is a work of fiction.
   In a newsletter provided by The New Yorker, Merve Emre offers her choice of "Five Great Campus Novels" and those choices are provided here along with pictures of Professor Emre. I hope she doesn't mind. I trust, as well, that The New Yorker won't mind my copying her selections. They do appear in a newsletter and I am not sure if they will show up in the print magazine, to which I subscribe, so I am offering them here in a post for posterity. 

  

Five Great Campus Novels (Selected by Merve Emre - "What We're Reading," The New Yorker Newsletter, c. Aug. 1, 2026)

  “Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe,” Randall Jarrell writes in “Pictures from an Institution.” In the 1954 novel, the university is home to two types: the asses and the industrialists. The former are dreamy, romantic; the latter, hard-nosed, pragmatic. Each of the campus novels below makes comedy out of these types, and warns us, as Jarrell did, “This institution’s drunk.”

The Amanda Cross Mysteries, by Carolyn Heilbrun (1964-2002)

Heilbrun was the first tenured woman in Columbia’s English Department. In her detective series, under the pen name Amanda Cross, an English professor solves murders whose motives include bad psychoanalysis, student riots, and biographers who know too much for their own good. My favorite, “Poetic Justice,” was described as a “homicidal valentine” to Heilbrun’s mentor, Lionel Trilling.

Possession, by A. S. Byatt (1990)

A swoony double romance. The first love affair is between a Victorian poet and poetess who wrote coded letters and poems to each other in the nineteenth century. The second is between two scholars in the nineteen-eighties who set out to answer the only question worth asking: Did the poets do it? A little-known fact: great chunks of the poems are sentences in blank verse from Henry James’s “The Golden Bowl.”

Moo, by Jane Smiley (1995)

A pastoral satire about a Midwestern land-grant university, for readers who find John Williams’s “Stoner” too nostalgic and sentimental. The campus novel with the funniest building name (“Old Meats”), and the only one I have read that features the workers of the university: cafeteria servers, horse trainers.

The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt (2000)

A zany modern epic about a suicidal mother and her genius son, who trade perusing the dust-choked libraries of Oxford for riding the Tube, and the pathetic utilitarianism of the élite university for a useless love of ancient languages, atonal music, and games of chance. Also: a helpful book for teaching young children the Greek alphabet.

I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe (2004)

Wolfe’s most hated novel, but my guilty pleasure since freshman year of college. At the fictional Dupont University, the beautiful, naïve, and self-superior Appalachian protagonist learns that what counts in the twenty-first century is not what you know, it’s who you know. Its alternative title could have been “Hillbilly Elegy.”

Sources: 
  A list of the "60 Best Campus Novels"  is found in Mulcahy's Miscellany in Campus Novels.  It is based on a list taken from Literary Hub and the citation is found in the post. Another list of "9 Best Campus Novels" is also provided, and for even more see Wikipedia's, Campus Novel.  

CANCON:

   For some older campus Canadian content see, The Rebel Angels, Robertson Davies.  For some very new, read the review of Lords of Serendipity, by Randy Boyagoda: "Both Sides Now: With His New Novel Lords of Serendipity, Randy Boyagoda Combines Two Worlds: Authorship and Academia," Emily Donaldson, Globe and Mail, Sept.3, 2026. An enticing bit from the review:
   "Lords of Serendipity is ultimately a campus novel that’s less about campus life than the global market that feeds it. Here is the university reduced to a ticket, a brand, a status symbol. Devi has set her sights on getting into Ochyps (OxfordCambridgeHarvardYalePrincetonStanford). What she wants to study is beside the point. She wants to study at Harvard because she wants to go to Harvard.

   The universities of Lords have effectively become borderless, drawing students from across the world even as their own substance and history are being hollowed out. Chapels become wellness centres, library stacks give way to meditation zones, a century-old Gothic quadrangle is “a beautiful front for hedge fund investments.” Employees are made to train the artificial-intelligence bots designed to replace them.

Boyagoda has, as ever, a sharp eye for the absurdities of university politics and pieties."