Vanity Publishing

A few weeks ago, “Michael Bérubé”:http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/balls_to_the_wall/ wrote a snarky post responding to a Joseph Epstein “review”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=5546&R=C4FE2FB13 of Elaine Showalter’s “Faculty Towers”:http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-0812238508-0, a brief history of the academic novel. As Michael says, the essay “honestly isn’t very good,” but I can understand why a little better after reading Showalter’s book. _Faculty Towers_ isn’t very good either, and it isn’t very good in the same ways as Epstein’s essay.

I came to the book prepared to like it. I’ve a weakness for short, peppy books on the by-ways of academe (Anthony Grafton’s “The Footnote: A Curious History”:http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-0674307607-0 is perhaps the classic of the genre). Furthermore, the academic novel is an interesting topic, a genuine sub-genre, with its own tropes and internal references. It deserves a history, but this isn’t the history it deserves. Not so much because of Showalter’s readings, although they’re often rather odd. We can pass over her one-paragraph dismissal of Randall Jarrell’s sublime _Pictures of an Institution_ in silence; tastes may differ. [1] But when she describes the conclusion of James Hynes’ wickedly funny “The Lecturer’s Tale”:http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=2-0312287712-5 as a “surprisingly positive, and even utopian ending,” one has to wonder whether she’s bothered to look at the book since her “original review”:http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i23/23b01101.htm (large chunks of which she reprocesses for _Faculty Towers_). If Hynes’ hero finishes up in a utopia, it’s a surpassing ambiguous one; his wife and children leave him, and his university is privatized and sold to a University of Phoenix type operation that makes “disturbing noises … about distance learning and the wealth of on-line resources and who-reads-books-anymore-anyway?” when asked about its intentions to restock the library (it’s probably spent the money already on its NFL franchise).

The real problem is a more fundamental one; Showalter’s self-indulgence. All too frequently, she turns from discussion of the academic novel to the far more fascinating topic of Elaine Showalter, her life, likes, dislikes, occasional fleeting appearances in the novels that she describes, and even, on one rather extraordinary occasion, her fleeting appearance in a _review_ of one of the novel that she describes. In Showalter’s eyes, the virtue of an academic novel seems to be directly proportionate to the degree with which she can identify herself (or, at a pinch, people like herself) within it.

Thus, the faults of the book are more revealing and interesting than its occasional virtues. The book is less an inquiry into the topic than a stylized example of a particular kind of bad reading. Many professors like reading academic novels because these books flatter their vanity. We can indulge our _amour-propre_ by submerging ourselves in fictional microcosms where the university is indeed the navel of the world (when it is not in fact the world itself), and where people like ourselves are heroes of sorts. _Faculty Towers_ presents this mild form of self-flattery in an exaggerated, and almost self-caricaturing way. Thus, like Epstein’s essay, it’s self-indulgent. Still, for the reasons stated above, Showalter’s self indulgence is of a peculiarly revealing variety; it’s a sort of academic “Mary-Sue-ism”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004188.html#004188. Showalter’s a serious literary critic, but she’s too close to her subject here to write well about it. I suspect that if she were writing about another genre, one in which she were less directly implicated, she wouldn’t have written a book that was as sloppy as this one. Perhaps a non-academic (or a less well known academic) would have done better, would have found it easier not to give into temptation. Unfortunately, Showalter not only gives in, but wallows in it.

fn1. I strongly suspect that Epstein is correct when he surmises that she’s as dismissive as she is because she’s taking Mary McCarthy’s side. One of the characters in _Pictures_ is a venomous and memorable pen-portrait of McCarthy, whom Showalter very clearly admires. But even if she finds the book unsympathetic for this reason, it surely deserves further discussion, because of its portrayal of the sexual politics of a small liberal arts college (a topic directly germane to the theme, such as it is, of Showalter’s book).