Question (from “Clyde”): May I write an academic novel and get revenge on all who have undervalued and tormented me in the groves of academe?
Answer: Well, you do have Ms. Mentor’s permission to write for revenge, one of the great pleasures of literacy. She is also pleased that you aim to be part of a noble genre cherished by Ms. Mentor’s public. Her June request for academic novels for summer reading netted some two dozen nominees, the earliest going back to the 1950s. Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim satirizes town, gown, and social-class antagonisms; Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution skewers some well-known intellectuals in the thinnest of disguises—giving frissons of superiority to those in the know.
Some academicians enjoy the notoriety. Professor Stanley Fish welcomes being identified with the academic hustler Morris Zapp, a character in David Lodge’s Changing Places and Small World. Elaine Showalter, professor emeritus and author of the wise and witty consumer guide, Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents, has recognized herself in two different academic novels—as a “prudish, dumpy, judgmental frump” and as a “voluptuous, promiscuous, drug-addicted bohemian.” She is gratified, mostly.
Ms. Mentor’s flock are well-read in academic novels, including ones about Native Americans (Harold Burton Meyers’s Reservations and The Death at Awahi) and about archaeologists in Egypt (Elizabeth Peters’s mysteries). Ms. Mentor’s readers like Alexander McCall Smith’s novella collection, At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances, and a rare novel from a student’s point of view, Tom Perrotta’s Joe College. Favorite titles can be mythological (Robertson Davies’s The Lyre of Orpheus) or vituperative (Bruce Gatenby, The Kingdom of Absurdities).
Not all writers are insiders revealing secrets. Some academic novelists, among them Roger Rosenblatt (Beet) and Tom Wolfe (I Am Charlotte Simmons) are sojourners, temporary visitors with a jaundiced, zoological view of the academic tribes. Wolfe is also said to be quite wrong about students’ musical tastes and sexual mores. (Ms. Mentor, a well-known fuddy-duddy, will not rule on that.)
Some writers do seem to be killing off their enemies: “Amanda Cross” (the late Carolyn Heilbrun) began secretly writing murder mysteries set at an Ivy League institution even before she got tenure at Columbia University. In academic novels, the dead bodies tend to pile up most egregiously in English departments.
As for Clyde, correspondent and would-be novelist, Ms. Mentor presumes that he is, or was, an inmate of more than one academic institution. She imagines that his issues are the common ones that outrage all geniuses trapped among mediocre minds. Your teaching skills have been unappreciated, even mocked, by undergraduates more concerned with their social lives than with the intricacies of, say, psychology or statistics. (“Am I likely to get pregnant?” is more urgent to them.) Your colleagues, mostly older than you, treat you as a whelp instead of as someone who’s au courant. You are cutting-edge; they are blunted cuticle clippers.
Meanwhile, your chair says he doesn’t have time to explain why you’re so grossly underpaid, and why your classes are scheduled for such awful hours. Your office mate whistles and leaves half-eaten food in the wastebasket. You cannot fathom why you’re not respected for your top-notch degree and your work with Professor Superstar. You’re lonely in a godforsaken cow town, and unlike the protagonists of academic novels, you don’t find lascivious female students throwing themselves at you.
You thought academe offered much more stimulation—and your novel will shout your “Is this all there is?” to the world.
Ms. Mentor may need to pull you back from the brink. If you spend your time writing a novel of revenge, will you be able to do the writing you need to get a tenure-track job or earn tenure? If your characters are recognizable, will their real-life counterparts be amused or outraged? If you make your characters safely vague or generic—not theory-murmuring Europeans nor brash purveyors of disgusting performance art—will anyone care?
Will you be writing about what you know? Most academic novels are set in England or New England, among the privileged. The professors with leisure time to contemplate and snicker at their surroundings are more apt to be at Harvard or Amherst, not Slippery Rock or Cuyahoga Community College—while editors are also more apt to be from elite institutions and willing to think of Ivy League weltschmerz and ennui as “universal.”
Yet the current favorite book among Ms. Mentor’s readers is not about academic poseurs in the Northeast. Jane Smiley’s intricate, energetic Moo (1995) takes place in a Midwestern agricultural university (presumed to be Smiley’s Iowa State). Moo‘s many schemers include an agronomist seeking a hearty female mate to move to Eastern Europe and inspire the natives. Another character plans to fatten up a giant pig to astound the world, while a secretary secretly shifts money from the athletic budget to the library.
Underemployed humanists love that touch. But in the 14 years since Moo was published, the world of real-life academe has grown nastier and more cramped, making it worse fodder for satire. Reader-recommended novels from this century are often about professors who leave. David Lodge’s hero in Deaf Sentence has to retire because he’s lost his hearing. The protagonists in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Francine Prose’s Blue Angel are both thrown out for sexual harassment.
Their lives are bleak—as are current prospects for publishing academic fiction. While Ms. Mentor was writing this column, word came that Harvard University Press was laying off seven people. The State University of New York Press laid off 15 per cent of its staff before Christmas. Other presses may go under, and trade publishers, such as Random House, lost interest in academic novels a decade ago. The three most recent novels recommended by Ms. Mentor’s readers are published by Impress Books in Britain: Degrees ‘R’ Us, A Campus Conspiracy, and The Whistleblower. All are by “Anonymous.”
But Clyde’s as-yet-unwritten novel may not be about the midlife crises of privileged male academics. Maybe it will be the first great novel about the real workers of academe, the adjuncts who now do some 70 per cent of college teaching. James Hynes’s The Lecturer’s Tale is almost alone in describing the underpaid, overworked teachers of composition. They are “the steerage of the English department, the first to drown if the budget sprang a leak.” Ms. Mentor thinks rage might be more appropriate than satire.
If a book is written for revenge, but it isn’t published, has revenge been achieved? Perhaps it has, if it inspires its author to lobby his legislature for education money, organize a union, create an angry and righteous blog, or run for political office to make changes. And books, even privately published ones, will outlast tweets, texts, blogs, e-mail messages, and, for that matter, advice columns. Even in our troubled times, saddled with debt and distress, Ms. Mentor notes that President Barack Obama is a best-selling author (Dreams From My Father). He is also a former professor.
Question: According to a recommendation that our search committee got from a British professor, “Mr. X has no personal objectionable habits.” We didn’t race to interview the candidate. Were we too picky? Must we feel guilty?
Answer: No.
Sage Readers: Ms. Mentor welcomes gossip, rants, and queries, as well as musings on ways that academics may or may not express themselves. She can rarely answer letters personally, but all are saved for possible future columns. Confidentiality is guaranteed, and identifying details are changed.
