The Campus Novel
As part of an independent study undertaken concurrently with the course on employment and professional development which I’m currently taking, this semester, I’ve read a handful of contemporary campus, or campus-adjacent, novels.
They’ve given body to the sometimes abstract ideas about higher education which we’ve been exploring in the course, and have been a distinctive pleasure given how much of my time as a reader is spent on eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literature.
How Should a Person Be?, by Sheila Heti, is not a campus novel, but a kind of autofictional postmodern kuntslerroman. It follows a literary artist named Sheila as she struggles to complete a play for which she has a grant from a feminist non-profit. It is, nevertheless, studded with moments apposite to life in the humanities, inasmuch as today, such a life is quite similar, sociologically, to a life in the arts.
She has her side-hustle (as a hairdresser, something she occasionally experiences as a more fulfilling and centered occupation than her literary work); she gets behind-hand with her “official” work; she questions the utility of what she does; she yearns for a kind of cultural fame which she understands to be out-of-reach by design; she navigates complex and at times humbling interpersonal dynamics in her passions and friendships. It’s an eminently legible world to any grad student in the humanities. More simply, to most anyone living in the urban U.S. or Canada nowadays.
Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher has been my favorite novel from this project. It’s tender, it’s deeply amusing, it’s a sweet-yet-sad crowd-pleaser, and to cap it all, it’s a really formally interesting twist on the epistolary form.
It’s told through a series of letters of recommendation which the first-person narrator (what he is in essence), a college professor and novelist named Jay Fitger at a fictional Midwestern university, writes on behalf of a wide range of students and colleagues.
It’s quite impressive technically in the way that it manages to integrate an overarching plot into a series of at-first seemingly disconnected professional letters of recommendation. The narrative centers on Fitger’s effort to secure a tenure-track job, or adjunct job, or postdoctoral fellowship, or summer job, or just a place to stay, for a wayward graduate student of his in whom he has great faith.
Though successfully funny, the novel has an unexpectedly deep pathos in its depiction of the human costs of the current nature of academia. It engages faithfully with underemployment and unemployment, the anomie attendant thereon, and the financial hollowing out of the arts and humanities in late-twentieth century American colleges and universities.
Finally, Theory, by Dionne Brand. Outwardly, the simple story of a grad student who is writing a dissertation, over a period of time that comes to exceed a decade. The story of her effort to do so is intertwined with the story of her erotic relationships with three very different women. This intertwining is intellectual as much as a matter of simple temporal overlap: the book is, among other things, a well-executed testament to the fact that our intellectual lives are shaped in non-incidental ways by our personal lives.
Theory, of all the books I read for this independent study, felt, in a curious way, most truly mimetic of something essential about contemporary campus living. Intensely, well, theoretical, it has something more of the flavor of a philosophical treatise than of a novel at times. It is an ambitious and compelling representation of an academic consciousness.
