Campus novels

BEEN DOWN SO LONG IT LOOKS LIKE UP TO ME, by Richard Farina. Thinly-disguised early 1960s Ithaca/Cornell. Hilarious and prescient.

I’m assuming you haven’t actually missed (only failed to mention) Crossing to Safety (Wallace Stegner).

Back in the day I really, really enjoyed Foolscap by Michael Malone.

I thought the film version of White Noise (on Netflix) was very funny. (The book’s even better naturally.)

I’m assuming that, even though it isn’t mentioned, you’ve read Lucky Jim. But Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution and Mary McCarthy’s Groves of Academe are also essential.And there’s some really good literary criticism about the genre by Christopher Findeisen.

Pnin is surely one of the greatest.

I’d echo the recommendation of Dear Committee Members, and Julie Schumacher’s follow up The Shakespeare Requirement is equally good (and a more conventional novel rather than epistolary). She has a new one coming out this month to complete the trilogy (David Lodge style?)

Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (1975) is something to add to your list.

Zuleika Dobson
by Max Beerbohm

Alison Lurie – The War Between the Tates

novakant @15:

Oh! That’s the one I was going to offer; now I’ll have to just second it, and offer my second choice, Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis. Two of the funniest novels in the history of English literature, 2 and 3 on the list in fact. Together with the David Lodge books, it raises the question of why academia is such a fruitful setting for comedy. Is it the special interplay between seriousness, pretention and folly? BTW, what about films? For example, Educating Rita?

And not a novel (because a poem): Philip Terry’s Dante’s Inferno, a retelling of the Inferno set on the campus of the University of Essex is simply wonderful (particularly if you know the University of Essex and have a working knowledge of British and Northern Ireland history and politics).

John l’Heureux, The Handmaid of Desire; Donna Tartt, The Secret History. It’s non-fiction, but draws on the genre: Betty Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close.

Also not exactly a novel: Ronald Knox, Let Dons Delight: a series of dreams of conversations in the Senior Common Room of Simon Magus College, Oxford, at fifty-year intervals from 1588. Skilled pastiche of successive styles, but requires some knowledge of English history.

Definitely a novel and hilarious: Tom Sharpe, Wilt. Qualifies if you count a community college in East Anglia as a campus. The other novels involving Henry Wilt are in my opinion inferior. Porterhouse Blue, about a college that has absolutely no connection with Peterhouse, Cambridge, honest, is quite good.

Robert Robinson, Landscape with Dead Dons. Maybe not a novel as it is only a detective story set in a university college, unworthy of serious intellectuals like CT people.

Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night. Also a detective story but definitely proto-feminist and so maybe qualifies.

Terry Pratchett: recurrent accounts of Unseen University and the Assassin’s Guild School, in too many satirical fantasy novels to mention.

Elly Griffiths’ Ruth Galloway murder mysteries probably qualify and are a lot of fun.

I learned about them here on CT many years ago, so I’m surprised no one has mentioned them yet.

Should have added Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels: a perhaps not entirely representative account of a Canadian university college.

The final scene of Straight Man is, to my mind, the funniest send up of an English Department I’ve ever read.

I was given a copy of it by a student in a writing class, saying I reminded her of William Henry Devereaux, Jr. After reading the first bit, where he obsesses over the imagined infidelity of his spouse, I said, “WTF, Madison?”

She said, “Not that. Just wait.”

She was right.

John Gardner’s ‘Mickelsson’s Ghosts’ (1982)

Blasted autocorrect: epistolatory novel

Thanks to those who put me on to the trilogy of Dear Committee Members–I just ordered the second book. One great reason why CT is my everyday site.

I read the first two of David Lodge’s campus trilogy and was really bothered by two things: the legitimization of the middle-aged male academic lusting after a female graduate student, and the borderline anti-semitic jewish stereotype of the brilliant but lascivious and cigar-smoking professor. Clearly products of their time, and perhaps no worse than their contemporaries, but it really put me off.

@SusanC, would def read an e-pistol Tory novel.

Conjure Wife is a solid recommendation, as is Giles Goat Boy.

Adding: The Glass Bead Game

And: liked Russ’s Straight Man; Rorty’s sounds like a must-read.

Richard Rorty?

Is that a typo by an chance?

William Gass, The Tunnel. I dare you.

William Gass, The Tunnel. I dare you.

Is it good. I bought it as a student because I found his work on metaphor very interesting, but never dared to read it. Maybe it’s time now.

To let Wikipedia do my work (and spelling) for me:
“The Hungry Ghosts: Seven Allusive Comedies is a collection of short stories written by Joyce Carol Oates. It was published in 1974 by Black Sparrow Press.”

One of the seven exactly mapped a clusterf@ck that was happening in, of all places, the MIT Humanities department at the time I read it (probably late ’70s or maybe early ’80s.) Whatever, I found the stories superb at the time I read them.

Again, Mr. Wiki: “The reception of this collection is very mixed. Josephine Hendin states that “the satire and self-satire in these stories is sour, personal, grim,” and that the stories “invariably expose … Joyce Carol Oates’s raw spleen,””

Dunno how that counts as part of a “mixed” response: that sounds like high praise to me…

Strongly recommend Lars Iyer’s Spurious / Dogma / Exodus trilogy.

Just bought, read and enjoyed Dear Committee Members. Thanks to commenters who recommended it and to Chris for the idea of the post.

John Q @ 53 Please read the sequels. I’m on The Shakespeare Requirement and it is spot on in tone and subject entirely!