The Wall Street Journal-20080216-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Books- Five Best

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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Books: Five Best

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[These satires of academic life deserve to sit at the head of the class, says Roger Rosenblatt]

1. Lucky Jim

By Kingsley Amis

Doubleday, 1954

The nature of institutions usually dictates how to treat them in fiction; thus universities, like governments, are most accurately portrayed by ridicule. The best academic novels are also the funniest. And the funniest of these in my book -- and most everyone else's -- is Kingsley Amis's "Lucky Jim." The novel obliterates the more obvious targets of academic life -- the savage senior faculty, the dismal standards of intellectual success, the steady flow of cant, the casual conspiracies, the petty humiliations -- particularly those suffered by our hero, Jim Dixon, the inept and embittered history don at a provincial British college. "Lucky Jim" also touches on the darkest and unhappiest feature of the academy: Love cannot breathe there. (Jim's poor excuse for a girlfriend says things like "How close we seem tonight, James," and "All the barriers are down at last, aren't they?") One of the funnier, if quieter, jokes of the novel is that Jim has no recollection of how he wound up where he is -- a puzzle all too familiar to academicians. In a way, he presages England's Angry Young Men of the 1950s. But he's the most likable of the lot, and, stuck in a university, he suffers more.

2. Eating People Is Wrong

By Malcolm Bradbury

Knopf, 1960

This novel follows the progress of Stuart Treece, a professor of English and the department chair at another second-tier British school. All one really needs to know about Treece's place of employment is that it is a converted lunatic asylum, often mistaken for a railway station. Standing in his way are the de rigueur cad, Louis Bates, and the love interest of both Treece and Bates, one Emma Fielding, a graduate student whose name sounds like English literature itself. Emma is writing her dissertation on fish imagery. This scene from a tea party will give you the flavor of the novel: "'Sugar?' said the lady in the flower pot hat. 'Yes?' said Treece; he thought she was being fond but she was simply pouring out his tea." One writer in a million -- and Bradbury was that -- would have picked the word "fond."

3. Small World

By David Lodge

Macmillan, 1984

I reviewed this British novel almost a quarter-century ago in the New Republic and stupidly found it wanting. I read "Small World" again recently and found it splendid. The subject here is literary conferences, their contents and discontents -- pointless papers, pointless trysts and the fathomless hell of literary criticism. The characters shine. Siegfried von Turpitz, a proponent of reader- response theory and the wearer of a sinister black glove, and Fulvia Morgana, a wealthy Marxist, circumnavigate the globe attending conference after conference in pursuit of a $100,000 Unesco chair of literary criticism. Other conferees include Morris Zapp, the flamboyant American post- structuralist author of five books on Jane Austen, and Persse McGarrigle, our hero, who mainly pursues beautiful doctoral student Angelica Pabst. To fully enjoy Lodge's satire one may need some background in the various schools of literary criticism. But why ruin your life?

4. Straight Man

By Richard Russo

Random House, 1997

Another idiotic English department? At least this one's in America -- West Central Pennsylvania University, a nice joke in itself. Hank Devereux, the department chair pro tem, is a wiseacre but an optimist and therefore envied and despised. (An interesting element of academic novels is that, at one time or another, everyone is envied and despised.) Russo tends to easy marks -- Grace DuBois, the once lusty poet who has gone to fat; Campbell "Orshee" Wheener, the protofeminist who appends "or she" to every "he"; and Hank himself, who has done what most professors do once they have published to avoid perishing: He never writes again. But for all the nonsense he suffers (he is suspected of killing a goose), one feels something for Hank and for the world beyond his reach. Every laugh Russo elicits precedes a sigh.

5. Pnin

By Vladimir Nabokov

Doubleday, 1957

"Funny" is not a quality ordinarily ascribed to Nabokov -- but he is. The laughter comes from the surprise and delight of reading an enthralling observer of the world. In "Pnin," our Russian-born professor of Russian at Waindell College frequents an unsuccessful restaurant "from sheer sympathy with failure." Timofey Pnin is a master failer, which accounts for his presence in the academy -- where Waindell's perfidious faculty members are amateurs in treachery compared with Liza, Pnin's wife. Collegiate intellectual life in general receives the back of Nabokov's hand: "Literary departments still labored under the impression that Stendhal, Galsworthy, Dreiser, and Mann were great writers." But the relentless focus here is on character, which is unusual in an academic satire -- Pnin's finickiness, his drab researches, his lurches toward love and especially his awkwardness in everything from speaking the English language to putting on his overcoat. By the time we're done, we have a Russian novel in full gloom, mired in an American college campus. Who could ask for anything more?

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Mr. Rosenblatt's latest novel, "Beet," an academic satire, was published last month by Ecco/HarperCollins.