Pat Kinsella for The Chronicle Review
The academic novel typically puts professors center stage, although it portrays them as hapless, eccentric, or troubled, as in Mary McCarthy’s Groves of Academe (1952), Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954), and David Lodge’s Small World (1984). But since the late 1990s, there has been a rising number of American academic novels that have displaced the professor from his customary starring role, focusing instead on those in marginal teaching positions or working in a peripheral realm of the university.
They show a new academic world, in which faculty no longer compose the core, replaced instead by temporary instructors and administrative staff who keep the money flowing.
This new wave coalesced in three well-regarded novels published in 2010, Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask, James Hynes’s Next, and John McNally’s After the Workshop. In The Ask, the protagonist, Milo, works in the fund-raising department of a New York university, although early in the book he gets fired, and the plot turns on his trying to procure a donation to regain his job. In Next, the hero, Kevin, has a staff job in the publications program of the Asia Center at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. And in McNally’s less well known but funnier After the Workshop, the protagonist, Jack Sheahan, a graduate of the M.F.A. program at Iowa, hasn’t managed to get a teaching job and works chauffeuring visiting writers around Iowa City.
In a previous era, they all would have been professors—Milo in art, Kevin in comp lit or philosophy, Jack in English—but that door seems closed. Instead, they are hanging on by a precarious thread, a long way from the classroom.
Hynes has been the leading portraitist of present-day, downsized academe. The subgenre first emerged in his collection Publish and Perish (1997). The opening novella, “Queen of the Jungle,” centers on a young academic, Paul, who fails to land a tenure-track position and works as a temporary lecturer at the University of the Midwest. Hynes’s Kings of Infinite Space (2004) is a kind of sequel, following Paul after his lectureship has expired, when he ends up in Texas working for the Department of General Services as a temp making $8 an hour. “How had he wound up here? " he muses. “He’d almost been a Fulbright!”
All that goes against the expectations of the genre. In the typical academic novel, the plot revolves around tenure—the hurdle that the hero overcomes, or the problem that events comically resolve around. Even if a character does not gain tenure, he moves on to another job—perhaps at a less prestigious college but still to a regular professorial position.
For example, in David Lodge’s Changing Places (1975), a memorable minor character named Howard Ringbaum fails to get tenure at Euphoria State University in California. (He’s memorable because he confesses during a party game that he has not read Hamlet, and that’s the straw that precipitates his negative tenure vote.) In Small World, the sequel, we meet up again with Ringbaum, who now is a professor at Southern Illinois University. This is offered with some humor and little sympathy since Howard is, as Lodge’s blunt hero, Morris Zapp, puts it, a fink who cheats on his wife and otherwise does questionable things off campus. But he is still a professor.
The hero of the new academic novel is a professor manqué, and the academic world is no longer a path to middle-class security.
In the past, the academic novel has been considered a quaint subgenre, but it has become a mainstream genre in the last three decades, especially in the United States, where it has enlisted a number of prominent novelists. Professors, it seems, have become a kind of everyman—or at least a white, middle-class everyman.
In the first half of the 20th century, the campus novel, focusing on student life, was the more dominant genre, and it naturally grafted with the bildungsroman, interspliced into classics like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920) and Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel (1929). The professor-centered novel was rarer, and often a stagey affair, set in the cloistered realm of a campus, most familiarly grafting with the mystery, in novels from Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night (1935) through the Amanda Cross “Kate Fansler” mysteries up to recent versions like D.J.H. Jones’s Murder at the MLA (1993).
The academic novel with its professorial star started gaining more traction after World War II, in notable examples like McCarthy’s Groves of Academe, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin (1957) and Pale Fire (1962), Bernard Malamud’s A New Life (1961), and John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy (1966), and, from Britain, Amis’s Lucky Jim. As postwar enrollments swelled, professors were no longer rare figures, although for the most part the university was still depicted as a separate, peculiar realm.
The American academic novel crested from the late 1980s to the mid-2000s. Although there has been little discussion of the fact, more than 70 academic novels were published from 1990 to 2000 alone, according to the standard bibliography, John E. Kramer’s The American College Novel (2004), which inventories works up to 2001 and doesn’t include mysteries (167 of those were published in the 1990s).
Even more significant, the genre enlisted a good number of well-known contemporary fiction writers, including Paul Auster, Ann Beattie, T.C. Boyle, Michael Chabon, Richard Powers, Francine Prose, Richard Russo, and Jane Smiley, as well as a few older veterans like Philip Roth and Robert Stone. Some of the novels are more distinguished than others, but they depict academe as a main theater of contemporary life.
The hero of the new academic novel is a professor manqué, and the academic world is no longer a path to middle-class security.
The key to their rise has been their ability to graft onto other established narrative forms, particularly the midlife-crisis novel, the marital-travail novel, and the middle-class job novel, paralleling the campus novel’s adapting to the bildungsroman. Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) exemplifies if not inaugurates this turn. The protagonist, Jack Gladney, is an academic, and much of the satire depends on his commentary and interactions with colleagues. But White Noise shoots for bigger fish, proffering a representation of the world we live in, set in the suburbs and with technology and media permeating our lives. White Noise fuses the marriage and family novel, transforming the genre into an allegory of postmodern American life.
The academic novel also captured broader social tensions, with a number of novels depicting the culture wars, such as John L’Heureux’s The Handmaid of Desire (1996), Prose’s Blue Angel (2000), and Roth’s Human Stain (2000), which dramatized the battles over feminism, race politics, and political correctness. The genre no longer recounted the romance behind ivied walls, but became a main public forum.
Two of the most popular novels of the past decade show that trend: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001) and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003). Attempting to capture the American family at the close of the century, The Corrections knits an academic novella into its expanse, with its first third focusing on the son, Chip, a college professor absorbed in the culture wars and literary theory. The professor is no longer a quirky figure but might hail from a suburb in the Midwest. The Da Vinci Code, a middlebrow thriller, features a debonair professor, Robert Langdon, who can negotiate his way through the world as well as through arcane knowledge. The professor becomes an expert who might consult with museums, the police, and government.
The new wave, however, represents a world from which professors have largely disappeared. Gone is the customary terrain of academic departments. “Queen of the Jungle” and After the Workshop have affinities to contemporary novels like Joshua Ferris’s well-regarded Then We Came to the End (2007), in which the employees of a company are progressively winnowed away. The novels portray the atmosphere of declining professional, middle-class jobs; today’s fear is not of becoming William H. Whyte’s Organization Man (1956), but an overeducated, underemployed man.
In The Ask and Next, teaching disappears altogether and the novels revolve around characters who do support work. In Next, Kevin works as an editor at the Asia Center, but his boss is the center’s administrative associate and his own job isolated and invisible (at a departmental event, he recalls how one professor introduced him as an editorial assistant). Also, the novel turns on his trip for a job interview with a private company; the walls of the academic world no longer hold.
Even more forthrightly, The Ask portrays the new, commercialized university, revolving around a fund-raising office and its machinations. Clark Kerr, who presided over the expansion of the University of California in its heyday, famously complained that the university had come to exist for students to have sex, the faculty parking, and alumni athletics; The Ask suggests that the university exists for the process of garnering funds and building monuments to wealthy benefactors. At one point during a meeting, a dean of development tells Milo that “we are not simply some heartless, money-mad, commercial enterprise. We are partly that, of course, but we are also a compassionate and, yes, money-mad place of learning.”
Professors barely exist in this cosmography, and students exist only in their relation to fund raising (the two students appearing in the novel do so because of their rich fathers, one precipitating Milo’s firing). The romance is gone: The university is no longer a castle of reflection, or even of backbiting.
The new wave also switches poles from the reparative resolution of the comic academic novel to more corrosive endings. Typically, in novels like Chabon’s Wonder Boys (1995) and Russo’s Straight Man (1997), the protagonists are flawed but likeable; the resolution pushes them out of their ruts, and despite some questionable things they do, they end up well. In Wonder Boys, for instance, the protagonist Grady Tripp, despite having stolen a rare Marilyn Monroe jacket from a colleague and having an affair with the colleague’s wife, ends up teaching at a small college outside Pittsburgh. He not only is still a professor, but gets the woman and family too.
The Ask is not nearly so forgiving. Milo ends up working on a piecework construction job, separated from his wife and son, and living in a rundown basement apartment. In Next, the main character, after spending the first half of the novel following—if not stalking—a young woman, ends up dying in a public disaster.
Even though their lives are comedies of a sort, the characters are distinctly unlucky. Contrast that to the postwar classic, Lucky Jim. Although Jim actually leaves academe—he gets drunk and makes a stumbling public lecture about “Merrie England"—things turn out well for him. He gets a coveted job as secretary to a Lord and the most sought-after girl. His fate is the opposite of that of the protagonists in Hynes’s books. They are casualties of the Hobbesian academic world.
The academic novel has obviously followed the fortunes of higher education in the United States. If its previous protagonist was a beneficiary of the post-World War II expansion of higher education, the new protagonist confronts the entrepreneurial university and the reconfiguration of academic labor, from full-scale employment to casualization, which explains the tendency toward black or corrosive humor. The previous protagonist, for all his foibles, was on the rise, carried along the tide of upward mobility, whereas now the characters are struggling against the draining of public institutions and emblems of downward mobility.
Genres are an alchemy of literary tradition and social circumstance. The academic novel still largely adhered to its traditional type through the middle of the century, casting academe as a cloister, but by the 1980s, as it drew a new generation of authors and a new audience who had experienced college as a natural part of life, it assimilated the less monkish and more common bearing of college-educated middle America, particularly of the white, middle-class suburbs.
Sometimes the rise of the academic novel is attributed to the rise of creative-writing programs, and that probably has been a factor. However, the salient issue is not that the academic novel represents the lives of writers, but that it draws a sizable audience, an audience that sees college as familiar and that understands the professor as a common, middle-class citizen. It resonates with the contemporary professional worker.
And of late, that is someone who is beleaguered, anxious, and afraid of unemployment.
