Five Great Campus Novels

“Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe,” Randall Jarrell writes in his 1954 satire, “Pictures from an Institution.” In the novel, the university is home to two types: the asses and the industrialists. The former are dreamy, romantic; the latter, hard-nosed, pragmatic. Each of the campus novels below makes comedy out of these types, and warns us, as Jarrell did, “This institution’s drunk.”

The Amanda Cross Mysteries, by Carolyn Heilbrun (1964-2002)

Heilbrun was the first tenured woman in Columbia’s English Department. In her detective series, under the pen name Amanda Cross, an English professor solves murders whose motives include bad psychoanalysis, student riots, and biographers who know too much for their own good. My favorite, “Poetic Justice,” was described as a “homicidal valentine” to Heilbrun’s mentor, Lionel Trilling.

“Possession,” by A. S. Byatt (1990)

A swoony double romance. The first love affair is between a Victorian poet and poetess who wrote coded letters and poems to each other in the nineteenth century. The second is between two scholars in the nineteen-eighties who set out to answer the only question worth asking: Did the poets do it? A little-known fact: great chunks of the poems are sentences in blank verse from Henry James’s “The Golden Bowl.”

“Moo,” by Jane Smiley (1995)

A pastoral satire about a Midwestern land-grant university, for readers who find John Williams’s “Stoner” too nostalgic and sentimental. The campus novel with the funniest building name (“Old Meats”), and the only one I have read that features the workers of the university: cafeteria servers, horse trainers.

“The Last Samurai,” by Helen DeWitt (2000)

A zany modern epic about a suicidal mother and her genius son, who trade perusing the dust-choked libraries of Oxford for riding the Tube, and the pathetic utilitarianism of the élite university for a useless love of ancient languages, atonal music, and games of chance. Also: a helpful book for teaching young children the Greek alphabet.

“I Am Charlotte Simmons,” by Tom Wolfe (2004)

Wolfe’s most hated novel, but my guilty pleasure since freshman year of college. At the fictional Dupont University, the beautiful, naïve, and self-superior Appalachian protagonist learns that what counts in the twenty-first century is not what you know, it’s who you know. Its alternative title could have been “Hillbilly Elegy.”

Our editors and critics choose the most captivating, notable, brilliant, surprising, absorbing, weird, thought-provoking, and talked-about books. Find your next great read »

Everybody’s talking about:

• Marlon James’s “The Disappearers” is “the novel of the decade, if not the century,” a Times headline declared this week. We asked Katy Waldman, who has a review of the book in this week’s magazine, to weigh in: “I loved this novel, and I love Dwight Garner’s passion! At a certain point, if a book thrills you enough, you kind of owe it to the work to dig into how it achieves its effects. For me, James’s maximalism and his emotional delicacy work in counterpoint, and he’s fearless—he really presses us to wonder for six hundred pages whether embracing your gayness in nineteen-eighties Jamaica is worth the suffering. It is worth it, and the affirmation is beautifully hard-won.”

Coming soon:

• “Children of the Wolf,” by Abby Geni, is about a woman who, decades after her childhood of being raised like a Viking in rural Iowa, notices that the men in her Michigan town are mysteriously disappearing. It’s out September 15th.
• Sarah Blakley-Cartwright’s “Heavy Cream,” centering on a sixteen-year-old girl abandoned by her mother in New York City, will be released on September 29th.
• Also out on the 29th is Robert Kolker’s nonfiction follow-up to “Hidden Valley Road”: “The Vanishing Family,” about the members of a nine-sibling family afflicted with a genetic mutation that causes a dramatic form of dementia.
• In small-screen news, Kit Harington is starring in an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities,” out on MGM+ on September 6th. You have just enough time for a read (or a reread).

Our critic Becca Rothfeld is loving:

• “One of life’s greatest pleasures is selecting an author and reading her obsessively for months at a time,” Rothfeld notes. “I’ve been inhabiting the world of Edith Wharton since February, and, as far as I’m concerned, she can do no wrong. All her most famous books are exactly as good as everyone says they are, and several of her less famous books are better than most people care to tell you. Perhaps best of all is her 1917 novella, ‘Summer,’ which is so luscious and earthy that it reads almost like D. H. Lawrence. What could be better than a book that can be read in one long gasp and which blends Wharton’s biting social commentary with sublime flights about the body and the seasons? Not much!”

P.S. The Mary Oliver documentary is now streaming.

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