Millennial Fiction Meets the Campus Novel Jeffrey J. Williams (bio) The campus novel has changed as campuses and their denizens have changed. Critics often treat the genre as a continuous one, harking back to Mary McCarthy's Groves of Academe (1952) and Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954), and they sometimes still invoke David Lodge's Small World (1985) as a send-up of contemporary academic life. But anyone coming through university gates since the late 1980s has encountered a very different world from Small World, and fiction has likewise changed. As I've described in "The Rise of the Academic Novel" (2012) and elsewhere, we have seen a new age of campus fiction since then, one that responds to the ubiquity of higher education in American life. Rather than an ivory tower, universities are a hub for real estate, industry, banking, healthcare, sports, technology, and cultural enterprises. And with 80 percent of Americans attending college at some point and millions working in teaching and staff positions, higher education permeates our culture and society. A good deal of fiction has responded to its contemporary state, and several recent novels by millennials give an updated sense of the troubled experience of those working in the institution. Since the late 1980s the academic novel—and I distinguish the academic novel, those dealing with the lives of college teachers, from the campus novel, which I reserve for those dealing with undergraduate life, largely on campus—left the confines of a quaint subgenre, like the locked room mystery, to meld into the mainstream of literary fiction, with entries by writers including Paul Auster, Ann Beattie, Michael Chabon, Susan Choi, Percival Everett, Denis Johnson, Jonathan Lethem, Sam Lipsyte, Lorrie Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, Tim O'Brien, Richard Powers, Francine Prose, Richard Russo, and Jane Smiley. They have dealt with the culture wars, sexual politics, midlife crises, love and relationships, work, and the vicissitudes of the professional-managerial class—staples of mainstream fiction. Around 2000 the genre spawned a new branch, the adjunct novel, depicting, instead of the bumbling but lucky Jim, decidedly unlucky Jims (see my "Unlucky Jim," Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 2012). James Hynes has been a prominent portraitist of the unlucky in Publish and Perish (1997), A [End Page 14] Lecturer's Tale (2001), Kings of Infinite Space (2004), and Next (2010), which depict underemployed PhDs scrambling for decent jobs. The adjunct novel has spawned its own subgenre, with micro-press or self-published entries like J. Hayes Hurley's The Adjunct (2006), Alex Kudera's Fight for Your Long Day (2010), and Geoff Cebula's Adjunct (2017). Rather than the crux of the plot turning on tenure, as in McCarthy's Groves of Academe or to a degree Lodge's Changing Places (1975), the new crux is landing a decent academic job in the first place. The past five years have seen a further development: snapshots from the millennial generation. In particular, three well-received novels—Weike Wang's Chemistry (2017), which won a PEN/Hemingway Award; Brandon Taylor's Real Life (2020); and Christine Smallwood's Life of the Mind (2021)—depict the demoralized world of graduate student researchers—less students than underlings in a lab—and elite adjuncts. The protagonists, like their authors, come from the millennial generation (Wang was born in 1988, Taylor in 1989, Smallwood in 1981) and show the enforced holding pattern of those in their late twenties and early thirties. The problem is not that they have difficulties—that is a conventional spring of narrative action—but that they have little chance for a better future. Their positions stand in sharp contrast to that of their advisers, who in each novel is a successful academic, receiving grants and plaudits and jetting off to give talks, but who has little understanding of their advisee's plight. Chemistry depicts an unnamed chemistry graduate student who works in a lab but undergoes a breakdown, a breakup, and ejection from academe, finding recovery while tutoring math. In short, poetic paragraphs, it combines an academic story with one of second-generation Asian American experience in the shadow of her parents, first-generation Chinese immigrants. Real Life likewise portrays a graduate...
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Jan 1, 2023
Elena Smirnova + 2
Open Access