Over at Tor.com, Jo Walton has a post titled “College as magic garden: Why Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin is a book you’ll either love or hate”. Tam Lin, for those who don’t know it, is a version of the old ballad set at a liberal arts college in the upper Midwest (I believe it’s based on Carleton, but I’m not sure). Jo’s got a good description of it in her post.
You might be surprised to learn that I come down on the “hate” side regarding this particular book. It’s not that the portrayal of the small liberal arts college environment is off, or anything– quite the opposite. It does a wonderful job of evoking the college experience of a subset of people who annoyed the hell out of me when I was at a small college. I always kind of wanted to smack them in real life, and I definitely want to smack them in the book.
This raises the general question of College Novels, though, and as I’m kind of burned out at the moment, I figure this is a good topic to throw open to the audience:
What are your favorite College Novels?
I’ve got two that I’d like to plug.
The first, sticking with the fantasy-novel-in-a-college-setting thing is Matt Ruff’s Fool on the Hill. It’s set at a version of Cornell, which doesn’t hurt, and it’s a good deal more direct than Tam Lin. It’s also about people who are a little closer to the people I knew and liked in college.
In some ways, it’s a bit of a mess– it was his first novel, I beleive– but I liked it a good deal more than Tam Lin.
The other is Joe College by Tom Perrotta, a novel about a poor kid going to Yale. This one’s a mainstream novel, so the courts of Faerie don’t show up, but it’s a dead-on portrayal of life at an elite college or university. The setting is a few years before my time, but I swear I can just about recognize everyone in it.
It also does a terrific job with a wide range of class issues. It’s not too heavy-handed about it, but it’s got some great material on the gap between rich and poor in America.
So, those are my favorite College Novels. Anyone else have suggestions?
Don’t think I’ve ever read any college novels (or at least anything I recognized as such…), but I’ll take a wild guess at why people either love or hate this particular one.
I read the post at Tor.com before seeing yours here and one thing in it really got me thinking: “College is where you are, as Janet puts it, paid to read for four years.”
Well I don’t think everyone will identify with that wiew of college, specially those who go to college planning on making a career out of science, like me (I’m sort of what you’d call an undergraduate physics student, but here in Brazil the nomenclature is a bit different). If anything I can’t read much of what I’d like to, being busy with lots of different textbooks and problem sets, the eventual technical paper. Not that I don’t enjoy all of that, but it’s time consuming and I hardly ever have any time left to read some fiction or pop sci. On the other hand I’ve got a part time job, so that probably takes a lot of time out of reading too.
So it seems that the description of college in the book (and I’m just infering this from the blog post, I don’t really have access to the book here in Brazil, so please forgive me if I’m absolutely wrong!) is one which lots of peolple can’t relate to.
But of course that’s only my opinion and I might be absolutely wrong, considering it’s based on a post about the book, and not the book itself… Just felt like ranting a little about not having the time to read some of the things on my to read list.)
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, also @ Cornell
Giles Goat-bay because it’s just so weird.
_The Secret History_ by Donna Tartt, set at a fictional small liberal arts college in Vermont.
I loved Russo’s Straight Man, about a hapless college dean and the motley crew of professors and students he tried to supervise, and Smiley’s Moo, about a middling liberal arts college in the throes of outgrowing its aggie heritage while some of its administrators are overreaching to turn it into a ranking research institution. Both novels are good at depicting how elusive real authority is in an academic institution (and how it’s never good to piss off the help).
Fool on the Hill is fantastic. It is as much a mess as you say, with some major chunks of pure wishful thinking (Tolkein House), but somehow when it’s all thrown together it just works.
I also liked “Fool on the Hill”. It occurred to me while reading it that Matt Ruff must have had lots of fun naming the characters.
I liked Stephenson’s Big U a lot at the time, if I recall. I was less enthused with Moo, though.
I’m a sucker for the old oxbridge-set novels. The first half of Brideshead Revisited (well the whole thing, but the Oxford-set part especially) and Zuleika Dobson came to mind.
Pnin, Nabokov’s 13th novel, and 4th in English, Doubleday, 1957, is a comedy of academic manners in a romantically disenchanted world. The central character is our old friend, the absentminded professor whom, as Charles Poore wrote in 1957 is: “a sardonic commentary on the civilization that produced him, a Mr. Chips with the bark on, a Mr. Malaprop cavorting cheerfully among the tragically dispossessed of our time.” Randall Jarrell “is right (meaning I agree with him) when he says it is also an original, heartbreakingly funny book. Then Edmund Wilson weighs in with the thought that Mr. Nabokov’s writing is something like Kafka, something like Proust, and ‘probably something like Gogol.'”
A false reflection of that is the goofy proto-post-modernist “Pale Fire” by Nabokov. As George Cloyne wrote in the New York Times in 1962: [“In an Elaborate Spoof, Nabokov Takes Us to the Never-Never Land of Zembla”, Sunday, May 27, 1962]: “All the time, Mr. Nabokov is a moralist. He has in mind an ideal order, not unlike an Edwardian version of Mr. Huxley’s Utopia. He would wish his men all to be tough-minded but luxurious, his women all brisk but totally accessible. Politics would wither under a benevolent order; affection, tempered by acerbity, would cement the community together. It would generally be admitted that the human race is silly, futile, incoherent, so as much time as possible should be saved from daily chores in order to leave space for good conversation, painless self-improvement and lighthearted meditation.”
“‘Pale Fire’ goes further than any of his previous novels toward defining such a Utopia. Whether it be a novel at all is open to question, so unconventional is its form. Mr. Nabokov has bundled all his ideas together this time. Just as in ‘The Real Life of Sebastian Knight’ he transformed himself into a narrator, so now he becomes Charles Kinbote, friend to the poet John Shade. The whole book is an elaborate spoof. Its central core is a narrative poem of 1,000 lines, introduced by Kinbote with appropriate reverence, and bearing the title of the book. The substance of the book is in a long series of notes to the poem–notes designed to construct a whole imaginary world, with its population, customs, royal family, philosophy, social customs, flung together at the hazard of a line-by-line commentary.”
So… the college novel gone nuts “Pale Fire” was the first great Hypertext novel!
The Fatal Handjob
James Wolcott, The New Republic
Published: Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Indignation
By Philip Roth
(Houghton Mifflin, 236 pp., $26)
College students today, showered with condoms and tastefully preserving their drunken, tonguetapping escapades on Facebook and MySpace for future in–laws and employers, have no appreciation of the sacrifices made by those who came before, the lusty pioneers of the sexual revolution. They take for granted the blowjobs and easy lay-ups made possible through the guerrilla activities of forgotten combatants in the early, undeclared stages of America’s war for erotic independence. For such uninformed fun bunnies, Philip Roth’s strange new novel may be the perfect back-to-school gift…. [truncated]
An interesting review of an interesting college novel. Not politically correct, to put it mildly. But something, perhaps, worth swallowing.
Craig beat me to it: Stephenson’s The Big U was written about the same time as I was at Wisconsin (he was at Ann Arbor then), and his description of the reactor lab was eerily accurate.
Liberal arts college? Moo is big public land-grant all the way, as I recall.
I’ll second Giles Goat Boy.
None of it is the least bit true to life and yet, in so many ways, he nails it.
— MarkusQ