Introduction: The New Campus Novel

On first glance, it seems easy enough to define the "campus novel" (which is as often called the academic novel). In many, maybe most cases, it's a comic, maybe satirical text that follows an alienated protagonist (who has, historically, been white and male) mired in and/or bounced around by any number of campus absurdities: department infighting, institutional rituals, budget agonies, bureaucratic nonsense, and so on. More often than not, this life at the college or university is complicated by petty antagonisms and/or romantic entanglements between colleagues, challenges offered by difficult campus characters (who are as likely to be students as professors), and, typically, confusingly shifting campus cultures and climates. Almost always, the conflicts emerging in this mix are vicious, as is often said, because the stakes are so small.

Some campus novels have drawn a good bit of attention over the years. One of the first, Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954), set the stage for the campus novel by following the bumbles of a junior professor trying to make good in a hypocritical academic universe. Another early one, The Groves of Academe (1952), by Mary McCarthy, distinguished itself by offering a large range of campus characters, some of whom are genuinely—and not amusingly—unsavory. Years later, David Lodge's campus trilogy—Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984), and Nice Work (1988)—put the campus novel on an international stage. Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985) turned the campus novel toward capturing and considering a larger American culture and cultural moment. Jane Smiley's Moo (1995) offered a Dickensian sprawl of eccentric and impassioned academics alongside a hefty dose of midwestern American agricultural studies.

here is an incomplete list of notable twentieth-century campus novels not mentioned above:

• Possession, A. S. Byatt

• Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon

• The Rules of Attraction, Bret Easton Ellis

• Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, Richard Fariña

• Pictures from an Institution, Randall Jarrell

• The War between the Tates, Alison Lurie

• A New Life, Bernard Malamud

• Galatea 2.2, Richard Powers

• The Human Stain, Philip Roth

• Straight Man, Richard Russo

• The Secret History, Donna Tartt

• Stoner, John Williams

In the twenty-first century, the campus novel continues to be written and read, and its tendencies have shifted enough that it deserves consideration as the new campus novel, as we're calling it. What distinguishes this new campus novel?

For one thing, the new campus novel often centers on the experiences of graduate students, as is the case in several of the books reviewed in this issue: Brandon Taylor's Real Life (2020), Christine Smallwood's Life of the Mind (2021), and Tiphaine Rivière's Notes on a Thesis (2016). Why might this be the case? Is the graduate student experience now so often so extended that it merits treatment by a novel? Has it become more interestingly fraught than before? In the absence of (m)any new assistant professors across the United States, as tenure tracks dry up and up and up, has the graduate student become the more prominent downtrodden outsider trying to make it in academia?

At the least, it seems likely that graduate students are prominent in the new campus novel because they more often represent new perspectives and identities in an institutional arrangement of tenure in which players, frankly, don't turn over with any great frequency. It's not in the bulge of established academics that we'll find many younger people, not to mention persons of color, or find as many open differences in sexual and gender identities. It's in books like those by Taylor and Smallwood and Rivière that we see these points of view and their particular challenges represented—and not always with the traditional turn toward a comedic relief valve. Taylor's book, for example, is grimly serious, even stark sometimes (and, most atypically for this tradition, features a main character in the sciences, not the liberal arts).

Even in those new campus novels where the central players are still professors (and administrators and campus staff), the hierarchies have changed; after all...