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.
― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 28 October 2021 21:36 (two years ago) link
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.
― gin and catatonic (Ye Mad Puffin), Thursday, 28 October 2021 21:37 (two years ago) link
Even Lucky Jim?
― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 28 October 2021 21:40 (two years ago) link
I still need to read Stoner (right? Big bone of contention on ILB from time to time).
― dow, Thursday, 28 October 2021 21:40 (two years ago) link
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.)
― Guayaquil (eephus!), Thursday, 28 October 2021 21:41 (two years ago) link
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.
― Guayaquil (eephus!), Thursday, 28 October 2021 21:42 (two years ago) link
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.)
― Guayaquil (eephus!), Thursday, 28 October 2021 21:43 (two years ago) link
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)
― dow, Thursday, 28 October 2021 21:48 (two years ago) link
(meant to take out "latter," sorry)
― dow, Thursday, 28 October 2021 21:49 (two years ago) link
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."
― gin and catatonic (Ye Mad Puffin), Thursday, 28 October 2021 21:52 (two years ago) link
And the same sort of joke permeates Nabokov too
― gin and catatonic (Ye Mad Puffin), Thursday, 28 October 2021 21:55 (two years ago) link
Have we talked about “A Separate Peace” or “The Rules of Attraction” yet?
― Legalize Suburban Benches (Raymond Cummings), Thursday, 28 October 2021 23:11 (two years ago) link
Gaudy Night is good imo, if you can put up with its being a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery.
― Lily Dale, Thursday, 28 October 2021 23:17 (two years ago) link
^ yes
Ross Macdonald's The Chill comes to mind too ... sometimes the campus novel is improved by murders
― Brad C., Thursday, 28 October 2021 23:26 (two years ago) link
Is Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets a campus novel y/n
― gin and catatonic (Ye Mad Puffin), Friday, 29 October 2021 00:14 (two years ago) link
i recall richard russo's 'straight man' being v. funny and good
― mookieproof, Friday, 29 October 2021 00:27 (two years ago) link
Characters in Small World, some of whom had appeared in the campus novel Changing Places, maintain that the campus novel is obsolete.
― alimosina, Friday, 29 October 2021 03:53 (two years ago) link
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!
― no lime tangier, Friday, 29 October 2021 04:43 (two years ago) link
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.
― no lime tangier, Friday, 29 October 2021 04:57 (two years ago) link
Well there's Hangsaman...
― abcfsk, Friday, 29 October 2021 08:34 (two years ago) link
xp I just started reading that! It's called Old Hall, New Hall
― Critique of the Goth Programme (Neil S), Friday, 29 October 2021 08:40 (two years ago) link
In a similar vein, many of the Gervaise Fen mysteries by Edward Crispin are set on or around campus
― Critique of the Goth Programme (Neil S), Friday, 29 October 2021 08:41 (two years ago) link
my takeaway here: campus novels are less bad and hated when characters are regularly being killed off
― mark s, Friday, 29 October 2021 12:38 (two years ago) link
Nobody gets killed off in Gaudy Night though, it's a murder-free mystery.
― Lily Dale, Friday, 29 October 2021 13:25 (two years ago) link
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).
― bulb after bulb, Friday, 29 October 2021 13:45 (two years ago) link