Academia’s Farcical Foursome

It began in 1954, with Kingsley Amis publishing Lucky Jim.  Surely generations of student-turned-professors had already found academia absurd, but nobody had articulated it quite so well.  So, if you find yourself nearly fed up with pretention, manipulation, incompetence, and all else that goes with, you owe it to yourself to spend some time with Jim Dixon, Margaret Peel, Christine Callaghan, and the Welch gang.

“How had [Welch] become Professor of History, even at a place like this?  By published work?  No.  By extra good teaching?  No in italics.  Then how?” 

And so it goes, with my favorite exchange being this one between Dixon and Callaghan:

“Because I like you and I don’t like him.”

“Is that all?”

“It’s quite enough.  It means each of you belongs to the two great classes of mankind, people I like and people I don’t.”

Amen.

Just two notes.  One, while there are wonderful female characters in all four works I am going to highlight, there is an unfortunate something to it having begun in 1954: the prof leads are all male.  So, there is a void for some great author to fill, to be sure.  Two, there have been at least a couple film adaptations of Lucky Jim (one of which is not Bob Odenkirk’s Lucky Hank—more on that in a moment), but I haven’t seen them.  I too have homework to do.

Next up, published in 1975, is David Lodge’s Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses.  I can’t rate this one with the other three… but nor do I wish to leave it out.  As Lodge explains in a 2010 Introduction, it was born when he took a leave of absence from his Birmingham University lectureship for a stint as a visiting Associate Professor at UC Berkeley.  It is likely to be most enjoyed by those who know at least a bit about ‘across the pond,’ and who think fondly of a thing or three from the 1960s.  The adventures of professors Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp are easily digested, and they continue forward into what becomes a trilogy.  I am a huge fan of that format (here I give a nod to its master, Robertson Davies), but while I certainly enjoyed the antics of Changing Places, again, I can’t place it equal to the other three in my ‘pantheon.’  Still, it is a fun read.

Which brings us to 1985, and Don DeLillo’s White Noise.  This one is so unique that it’s hard to know where to begin.  But from the disciplines of Hitler Studies to car crashes to Elvis; to an airborne toxic event (Nyodene D.) that ultimately makes sunsets unbelievably beautiful; to the secret life of unlicensed psychopharmaceutical Dylar… there is just something in this novel’s DNA that sings. 

“We are the highest form of life on earth,” DeLillo notes, “and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.”  Thus it is that “all plots tend to move deathward.  This is the nature of plots.”  Sigh.  And yet there is “the day Wilder got on his plastic tricycle” and those sunsets from the overpass… you owe it to yourself; give this one a read.

There is also a 2022 film adaptation starring Adam Driver as Professor Jack Gladney.  It had great promise, but I felt it lost itself partway through.  At the least, one ought to first read the book, as is typically the case.

Last, but most definitely not least, there is Richard Russo’s 1997 Straight Man.  Russo is one of the few authors for whom I would recommend reading every novel he has written, even as one ought not expect each to match his best, three brilliant works written a row: Nobody’s Fool (ultimately the first of the North Bath Trilogy), Straight Man, and Empire Falls.

As for our focus here (the academic novel), there is no better ridiculous—yet mostly loveable—academic than professor William Henry (“Hank”) Devereaux Jr.  So, if you are going to read only one, as they say, make it Straight Man.

Finally, there are excellent film adaptations of some of Russo’s work.  Paul Newman is spot on as Donald “Sully” Sullivan in Nobody’s Fool, surely because he was right in thinking “the character … the closest to himself that he had ever played.”  Ditto Ed Harris as Miles Roby in Empire Falls… and there you get an ever-wonderful Philip Seymour Hoffman and the last Paul Newman work to boot.  But while I am a huge fan of Bob Odenkirk—I am the proud owner of the LWYRUP plate in Oklahoma—I’d give Lucky Hank a pass.  It is the plot of Straight Man, sort of (paying homage in title to Lucky Jim)… but scripted in a way that it could have, had it not bombed out, become a continuing series.  Yup, that’s precisely the way to ruin a brilliant one-off.