The Campus Novel: Why Is It So Bad & Hated

xxpost But even high school me could tell that Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me was hipster sexist---intro by Pynchon, Farina's own Cornell roommate, made it worth getting, though (and maybe a few other things).

Will have to check Delillo's, if he does something different w the setting etc.

Pnin is cool.

I liked Pictures from an Institution, but I am a Jarrell stan so that makes sense.

Are The Secret History and The Magicians campus novels? What about Mysteries of Pittsburgh?

Didn't get very far w that last.
"Franny" 's collegiate connections v. pointed, apt.

Good subject.

I'd count The Secret History and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh for sure. The latter's one of my favorite debuts.

Also: Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution and Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise.

BTW I am on record as hating Secret History pretty intensely. Mostly meh on the rest except for Pnin, which is really hard to hate imo.

Even Lucky Jim?

I still need to read Stoner (right? Big bone of contention on ILB from time to time).

I kind of liked David Lodge books once upon a time but I feel pretty confident I would not like them now. (At the time, they were the absolutely prototypical "campus novel," though maybe they've been forgotten now.)

Oh yeah, those Lodge books feature another type of hacky stock character, the feuding academics who are ridiculous because they care so much about stakes that are so small.

For a campus novel to be any good, it has to recognize that both academics and students are engaged in a project of real importance and that scholarship is actually profound and important, not a status game of competing trivialities. (And if you think scholarship is a status game of competing trivialities you shouldn't write campus novels, you should write about something you actually think matters.)

As a reader, if it matters to the characters, it matters to me, if the writing's good enough---which for me means there should be a sense of justice, not just taking the piss (justice can incl. *some* ttp, latter, though)

(meant to take out "latter," sorry)

The one David Lodge book I know is about OCD, I think?

Anyway White Noise is pretty much a campus novel in my view, and it is arguably one of the good ones!

1. It takes place in and around a college campus in the northeastern United States.

2. The protagonist is a middle-aged white male professor with a tinge of horniness.

BUT

2a. Thankfully he does not, so far as I know, direct his horniness at nubile coeds or impoverished adjuncts.

3. It satirizes late-20th-century academic hyperspecialization for comic effect, in much the same way as Jarrell does. To the extent that I sometimes don't remember in which novel I read a particular bit of said skewering. Viz:

Is it White Noise that has the PhDs who have only ever read cereal boxes? Or is it chewing-gum wrappers?

One novel (I forget which) has a cocktail-party argument between one professor whose specialty is philosophy of history, and another whose specialty is the history of philosophy. The line is something like "a soap bubble is as significant as an empire."

And the same sort of joke permeates Nabokov too

Have we talked about “A Separate Peace” or “The Rules of Attraction” yet?

Gaudy Night is good imo, if you can put up with its being a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery.

^ yes

Ross Macdonald's The Chill comes to mind too ... sometimes the campus novel is improved by murders

Is Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets a campus novel y/n

i recall richard russo's 'straight man' being v. funny and good

Characters in Small World, some of whom had appeared in the campus novel Changing Places, maintain that the campus novel is obsolete.

at the more fantastic end of campus novels: loved giles goat-boy in my teens, really not sure what i'd make of it now in the unlikely event of ever revisiting. only other barth i've read is end of the road, also a campus novel from my vague recollection of it.

trying to remember if there was a chapter on this subject in fiedler's waiting for the end? they definitely get covered to some degree there in any case.

also re: pnin, yes!

Gaudy Night is good imo, if you can put up with its being a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery.

in the same realm, a number of michael innes (a.k.a. professor j.i.m. stewart) novels are set on campus. can remember a good one based at a circa 1950s so-called red brick university.

Well there's Hangsaman...

xp I just started reading that! It's called Old Hall, New Hall

In a similar vein, many of the Gervaise Fen mysteries by Edward Crispin are set on or around campus

my takeaway here: campus novels are less bad and hated when characters are regularly being killed off

Nobody gets killed off in Gaudy Night though, it's a murder-free mystery.

Seem to be having a campus novel year: have read Stover at Yale, Pnin, and Cather's The Professor's House this year, and just looked at my unread copy of The Art of Fielding (put it back on the shelf). Also watched The Group last night, though not enough time on campus to make that a campus movie/novel (read the book years ago and gave it to my sister as a questionable graduation present).