Campus Novels

 Reading Week
   Next week is 'Reading Week' on the campus close by. We used to call such a week, 'Slack Week' and there was only one of them, which came around this time of year. Now there is also one in the fall, which surely means that the students these days are better read than we slackers were. 
   There is no reason why they should have all the fun, so I am offering a relevant reading list which will last you over the many 'Reading Weeks' yet to come. It is relevant in that all of the books relate to campuses of one sort or another and, although they are works of fiction, they may enlighten us about what is really going on in the shadows of the ivory towers.
   This list comes, indirectly from this article: “There’s Always Been Trouble in ‘The Groves of Academe’: How a 1950s Novel Explains the Crisis in Higher Education,” A.O. Scott, The New York Times, Jan. 31, 2024. (Careful readers of MM will know that the "Groves" reference can be connected directly to that campus close by.) These two snippets from it should encourage you to read the entire article and are likely to increase your interest in the list that follows:

   Every squawking buzzard in American public life — every quarrel about race, class, sex, foreign policy, pronoun usage — takes wing from or comes home to roost on campus…
- and especially this one:
  I would go so far as to claim that the modern university campus — in actuality one of the most systematically humorless habitats ever devised by human beings — is the only reliably funny place in contemporary literature.

  In the article there is a link to the list that follows. A full reference is provided and you should have a look at it. The author offers useful brief descriptions which can help you select from the sixty. For example, #4 consists of "277 pages of absolute zingers," #16 is"Not strictly a campus novel," and #39 is worth a look since, "Any book that includes skinny dipping in Walden Pond is literary catnip." 
The source: "The 60 Best Campus Novels from the Last 100 Years From Evelyn Waugh to Rebecca Makkai," Emily Temple, Literary Hub, Nov. 2, 2022. The list is basically in chronological order, so the most recently published is the last one. Of course, as usual, additional essential information is found at the end.

1. Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall (1928). 
2. Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night (1935)
3. Mary McCarthy, The Groves of Academe (1952)
4. Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution (1954)
5.Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (1954)
6.Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957) 
7.John Knowles, A Separate Peace (1959)
8.Louis Auchincloss, The Rector of Justin (1964)
9.John Williams, Stoner (1965)
10.Richard Fariña, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966)
11.Alison Lurie, The War Between the Tates (1974)
12.David Lodge, The Campus Trilogy (1975; 1984; 1988)
13. Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline (1980)
14.Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety (1987)
15.Fleur Jaeggy, tr. Tim Parks, Sweet Days of Discipline (1989; translation 1993)
16.A.S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance (1990)
17.Javier Marías, tr. Margaret Jull Costa, All Souls (1992)
18. Donna Tartt, The Secret History (1992)
19.Ishmael Reed, Japanese by Spring (1993)
20.Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)
21.Jane Smiley, Moo (1995)
22.Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys (1995)
23.James Hynes, Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror (1997)
24.Richard Russo, Straight Man (1997)
25.Philip Roth, The Human Stain (2000)
26.Denis Johnson, The Name of the World (2000)
27.Tobias Wolff, Old School (2003)
28.Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005)
29.Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep (2005)
30.Zadie Smith, On Beauty (2005)
31.Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006)
32.Jean Hanff Korelitz, Admission (2009)
33.Paul Murray, Skippy Dies (2010)
34.Lan Samantha Chang, All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost (2010)
35.Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding (2011)
36.Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (2011)
37.Pamela Erens, The Virgins (2013)
38.Susan Choi, My Education (2013)
39.André Aciman, Harvard Square (2013)
40.Christopher J. Yates, Black Chalk (2013)
41.Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members (2014)
42.Tana French, The Secret Place (2014)
43.Elif Batuman, The Idiot (2017)
44.Weike Wang, Chemistry (2017)
45.R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries (2018)
46.Jordy Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox (2018)
47.Sally Rooney, Normal People (2018)
48.Juliet Lapidos, Talent (2019)
49.Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House (2019)
50.Mona Awad, Bunny (2019)
51.Elisabeth Thomas, Catherine House (2020)
52.Kate Weinberg, The Truants (2020)
53.Brandon Taylor, Real Life (2020)
54.Emily M. Danforth, Plain Bad Heroines (2020)
55.Christine Smallwood, The Life of the Mind (2021)
56.Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family (2021)
57.Lee Cole, Groundskeeping (2022)
58.Julia May Jonas, Vladimir (2022)
59.Elaine Hsieh Chou, Disorientation (2022)
60.Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions For You (2023)

Other stuff:
   For another list see: "9 Best Campus Novels (and One Memoir)," Emily Layden, Publishers Weekly, Feb. 17, 2021 (6 of them are not on the above list.) Of course there is also Wikiwands, "Campus Novel." "Campus novels exploit the fictional possibilities created by a closed environment of the university, with idiosyncratic characters inhabiting unambiguous hierarchies." 
   If you don't read, watch this on Netflix: "The Chair" starring Sandra Oh.
Or watch "Lucky Hank" with Bob Odenkirk on Prime.

CANCON

   If you look at the original article and the comments at the end, you will find many suggestions submitted by readers. One of them is: Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels. 

The Racket

As the students stream through the gates on the other side of town I have the opportunity to provide you with my favourite generic job description for faculty at a university. As the provider, I acknowledge that I was not successful as an academic and am likely to be charged with being  ‘envious’ by those who were. Who wouldn’t be? I will also quickly add that I know many faculty who work very hard.

The author of the piece that follows was a member of the academy and for years, the editor of The American Scholar. He has produced many books, including one on Envy and one with the great title, Fabulous Small Jews. While he was a faculty member for many years and should know what it was like to have such a job, you may also want to keep in mind that he was probably on the wrong side in all of the culture wars being waged. As well, this description is probably a little dated since one suspects that things are much grimmer these days and that faculty members everywhere do now have real reasons to be unhappy.

    “I had a friend, now long dead, named Walter B. Scott, a professor at Northwestern University whose specialty was theatrical literature, who never referred to university teaching as other than a--or sometimes the--"racket." What Walter, a notably unambitious man, meant was that it was an unconscionably easy way to make a living, a soft touch, as they used to say. Working under conditions of complete freedom, having to show up in the classroom an impressively small number of hours each week, with the remainder of one's time chiefly left to cultivate one's own intellectual garden, at a job from which one could never be fired and which (if one adds up the capacious vacation time) amounted to fewer than six months work a year for pay that is very far from miserable--yes, I'd say "a racket" just about gets it.

     And yet, as someone who came late to university teaching, I used to wonder why so many people in the racket were so obviously disappointed, depressed, and generally demoralized. Granted, until one achieves that Valhalla for scholars known as tenure--which really means lifetime security, obtainable on no other job that I know--an element of tension is entailed, but then so is it in every other job. As a young instructor, one is often assigned dogsbody work, teaching what is thought to be dull fare: surveys, composition courses, and the rest. But the unhappier academics, in my experience, are not those still struggling to gain a seat at the table, but those who have already grown dour from having been there for a long while."

    So far as I know, no one has ever done a study of the unhappiness of academics. Who might be assigned to the job? Business-school professors specializing in industrial psychology and employer/employee relations would botch it. Disaffected sociologists would blame it all on society and knock off for the rest of the semester. My own preference would be anthropologists, using methods long ago devised for investigating a culture from the outside in. The closest thing we have to these ideal anthropologists have been novelists writing academic novels, and their lucubrations, while not as precise as one would like on the reasons for the unhappiness of academics, do show a strong and continuing propensity on the part of academics intrepidly to make the worst of what ought to be a perfectly delightful situation.”

Source: “Civilization and Its Malcontents: Or, Why Are Academics So Unhappy,” Joseph Epstein, The Weekly Standard, May 9, 2005. Read the rest of the essay which is a long review of Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents, by Elaine Showalter.