Whether swallows return willingly to Capistrano only ornithologists know, but the campus novel is with us unto the end of time—or at least until virtual campuses drive real ones out of business.
Its lineage dates back as far as the individual scholar chooses to track it. For some who write about the “university novel” in England, it begins with Chaucer. For American critics with the long view, it begins with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s first novel, Fanshawe (1828). Every academic can cite the great ones. Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) and Malcolm Bradbury’s Eating People Is Wrong (1959) and The History Man (1975) win enduring kudos in Britain, and the classic American examples now form a settled list: for starters, Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1952) and The Group (1963), Randall Jarrell’s Pictures From an Institution (1954), Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin (1957), Bernard Malamud’s A New Life (1961), John Barth’s Giles Goat Boy (1966), and Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985).
Many master novelists have turned their hands to one or more, and who can blame them? The classical unities of time and place come helpfully provided, right down to academic calendars and delineated campus acreage. The built-in tension between the noble ideals of higher ed and the ignoble characters who participate in them bolsters whatever friction the novelist’s imagination seeks to add. Then there’s the truism that novelists are supposed to write about what they know, and what they know today is frequently the campus at which they teach.
Philip Roth, that swallow who likes to alight on familiar territory, can be credited with at least two recent efforts—The Human Stain (2000) and Indignation (2008). Richard Russo, amid his working-class classics, gave us Straight Man (1997). Tom Wolfe, whose Ph.D. in American studies long ago slipped from sight as he became the champion of hard-nosed showy journalism and the “reported” novel, turned his kids into stringers to help him produce I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004). David Lodge offered a rollicking trilogy, from Changing Places (1975) to Small World (1984) to Nice Work (1988). J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), one of his most powerful books, showed that a campus novel won’t cost you the Nobel. Younger novelists, from Jane Smiley with Moo (1995) to Zadie Smith with On Beauty (2005), show no sign of letting the form recede.
Yet the more you think about the “campus novel,” the more you realize how it has outgrown its neighborhood, and is more complicated than it seems. Is it any novel that begins on a campus, or must matters peculiar to campus life—the life of the scholar, the privileged atmosphere of the ivory tower, the excessive focus of its older denizens on tenured security, the hierarchically rigid interaction of lifers and young people—form the heart of the story? If a story just “happens” to take place on campus, is that enough? Do novels about scholars, and novels about students, belong in the same category?
Questions about the campus novel return this month, like raised hands in the classroom, because—spread the good news—contemporary master Jeffrey Eugenides now gives us The Marriage Plot (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October), the most entertaining campus novel since Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons. Entertaining, for sure, but also poignant, insightful, wise, and elegiac. Perhaps mindful of how many academic novels parallel their fall pub dates with plots that start with the fall semester—the renewed underlining of reading in Pnin, the unpacking of cars in White Noise—Eugenides builds The Marriage Plot on graduation day, which proves an inspired base.
The setting at the outset is Brown, Eugenides’s alma mater, in 1982, and we quickly get to know the three seniors who will dominate the book. Madeleine Hanna, pretty daughter of the ex-president of a small New Jersey college, surrounds herself with 19th-century Victorian novels and feels out of place—and time—as postmodernism, semiotics, and structuralism take over literary studies and the Brown English department. Leonard Bankhead, biology student and tyro philosopher, heads toward the exit with a reputation as the class’s most successful bedder of women his freshman year, and more recent respect as a powerful intellect. Mitchell Grammaticus—Greek-American like Eugenides, a religious-studies major drawn ever more to mysticism and service—suffers over his continuing obsession with Madeleine, whom he met freshman year, but he has never managed to close the deal.
Now, in their eighth semester, Madeleine meets Leonard in Semiotics, and they’re spending every night together. Oldest plot in the world—a triangle with the odd man out.
And yet, thanks to Eugenides’s careful orchestration, it isn’t. More expertly than any campus novelist in recent times, Eugenides brings all the force of his story to bear on a point in the life of every college graduate that gets less attention than campus activity. It’s that instant of escape velocity when the gravitational pull of college—all the friendships, habits, and seeming commitments—snaps, and one finally enters a new, free-floating realm with the vast number of people who have escaped “campus gravity” before.
Before reaching that late stage, he writes beautifully and precisely about the Brownian motion of his characters, as if they and that time mean the world to him. Madeleine, “finger combing” her hair, worries that she might be “destined to go through life being cowed by less-capable men.” Mitchell, brimming with acquired culture, describes Madeleine’s teasing behavior as “the erotic equivalent of bread and circuses, with just the circus.”
Leonard, succeeding where Mitchell has failed, charms Madeleine by playing word games with her, riffing eponymous adjectives off her name: “Hannaesque. Stubborn. Given to ironclad positions.”
Eugenides engraves his secondary characters more than he draws them, positioning them with telling lines. When Madeleine’s perfect upper-middle-class mother, Phyllida, learns of Mitchell’s plan to travel to India for a gap year working for Mother Teresa, she trills that for a religious-studies major like him, “India would be a perfect fit. They’ve got everything. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, Jains, Buddhists. It’s like Baskin and Robbins!”
Readers wanting crisp portraits of the pedagogical ethos of the time will not be disappointed:
“Some people majored in English to prepare for law school. Others became journalists. The smartest guy in the honors program, Adam Vogel, a child of academics, was planning on getting a Ph.D. and becoming an academic himself. That left a large contingent of people majoring in English by default. Because they weren’t left-brained enough for science, because history was too dry, philosophy too difficult, geology too petroleum-oriented, and math too mathematical—because they weren’t musical, artistic, financially motivated, or really all that smart, these people were pursuing university degrees doing something no different from what they’d done in first grade: reading stories. English was what people who didn’t know what to major in majored in.”
Brown faculty of the era also get their moment in the sun, their photograph, such as this one of “Michael Zipperstein,” the school’s semiotics czar. Zipperstein in 1975 had “met Roland Barthes at a dinner party and been converted, over cassoulet, to the new faith. Now Zipperstein taught two courses in the newly created program in semiotics studies. ... Hygienically bald, with a seaman’s mustacheless beard, Zipperstein favored French fisherman’s sweaters and wide-wale corduroys. He buried people with his reading lists: In addition to all the semiotic big hitters—Derrida, Eco, Barthes—the students in Semiotics 211 had to contend with a magpie nest of reserve reading that included everything from Balzac’s Sarrasine to issues of Semiotext(e) to photocopied selections from E.M. Cioran, Robert Walser, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Peter Handke, and Carl Van Vechten.
“To get into the seminar, you had to submit to a one-on-one interview with Zipperstein during which he asked bland personal questions, such as what your favorite food or dog breed was, and made enigmatic Warholian remarks in response. This esoteric probing, along with Zipperstein’s guru’s dome and beard, gave his students a sense that they’d been spiritually vetted and were now—for two hours on Thursday afternoons, at least—part of a campus lit-crit elite.”
Eugenides in The Marriage Plot maintains all the gifts of his two earlier acclaimed novels, The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex: superb clarity in plotting and description, a Bellovian ear for dialogue, and a winning wryness about human nature that turns serious and probing when it should. Here he weaves an intricate tapestry of relations among Madeleine, Leonard, Mitchell, and their intimates that convinces as it provokes and saddens. Like Jonathan Franzen, and unlike such overpraised contemporaries as David Foster Wallace and William Vollman, Eugenides doesn’t preen or use sentences to point to himself. He’s Tom Wolfean in his attention to detail, but his sentences don’t wear white suits. His characters and their undecided lives come first.
Although The Marriage Plot circles back to campus in clever ways—one route being that inevitable party at which recent graduates compare their new lives as if rehearsing for reunions—it almost geometrically recarves the campus novel by eventually targeting the year after graduation. Eugenides’s “secret history” may well be his own. Witnessing the deep involvement that the writer brings to events set nearly 30 years ago, one suspects that Eugenides’s Brown contemporaries will see more than a little Jeffrey in Mitchell.
More important, the author drives home a truth that many campus novels ignore: After four years, the world sweeps you up with a vengeance, and only the most precious of commitments will survive.
