Who Are YOU in the Academic Novel?

I love reading Ms. Mentor. She’s one of my very favorite parts of The Chronicle and one of those columnists with whom I feel a deep sense of connection. Every time I read her always wise and sometimes snarky letters, I feel like I’m having a cup of coffee with her and wishing it were actually so.

I’ve always loved Ms. Mentor’s books, Ms. Mentor’s Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia and Ms. Mentor’s New and Even More Impeccable Advice for Women and Men in Academia. I love these books not only because the fabulous Nicole Hollander has done the covers but because Ms. Mentor, occasionally known as Professor Emily Toth, offers advice which is honest, funny, challenging, and easy to adapt-and by this I mean, you can pilfer her wisdom, passing it off as your own, and then in good conscience offer it to people in similar situations who pose impossible questions to YOU.

I’m mentioning this now because Ms. Mentor’s last column—”Is There a Cure for the Summertime Blues?”—got me thinking about what are often called “campus novels.”

I agree with her that Small World, although, in parts, now quaint, and in some of its details, outdated, is still an enormously fun read. Lodge captures the petty jealousies, the internecine battles, and the convoluted paths of sexual desire between colleagues better than anyone else. Lodge gets full marks, even in 2010, for Small World.

And I’ve taught Francine Prose’s Blue Angel, discovering that students liked it as much as I did— meaning it was a big hit.

But I’d like to take Ms. Mentor’s idea and push it even further.  What I’m really interested in is finding out which academic novel or play—let’s not forget Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? shall we?—best portrays the life we actually live.

What professor reminds you of you?

Is it Anita Brookner’s heroine from The Debut, of whom it was said, “Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature”? Is it one of the characters from Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim? Is it someone from Special Topics in Calamity Physics? Or one of the lecherous professors from Atwood’s short story “The Bog Man”? Or Weldon’s “Ind Aff”? Is it one of the women from Godwin’s The Odd Woman? Or perhaps Zuleka Dobson’s grandfather in Beerbohm’s novel? Are you one of the girls from Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman or one of the guys from Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man?

I first read Mary Sarton’s The Small Room between my junior and senior years at Dartmouth when dating a boyfriend who wanted to become an academic, and who encouraged me to think the closest I would ever get to becoming an academic myself would be to become an academic’s wife. I loved the novel, and it was one of the first times I ever started to think about what it would be like to be a professor myself.

I still have a deep affection based on loyalty rather than respect for Sarton’s small, tidy novel (which seemed to emerge from a poem she wrote called “Small Rooms” that I happened to stumble across in an old copy of McCall’s or Good Housekeeping while staying in a bed and breakfast a few years ago). The magazine was from the late 50s or early 60s, and the owners of the B&B prided themselves in having these sort of pseudo-antique publications scattered around the place. It was a shock to discover Sarton’s poem—as I remember it was only a few lines—amidst articles about how to keep your man happy and your collars neatly pressed.

Published in 1974, Tom Sharpe’s novel Porterhouse Blue was where I first discovered the term “doctoratitis,” the “assumption that a man’s worth is to be measured by mere diligence. A man spends three years minutely documenting documents . . . investigating issues that have escaped the notice of more discriminating scholars, and emerges from the ordeal with a doctorate which is supposed to be proof of his intelligence.”

I always wanted to be Sandra Dee from Tammy and the Professor—although, God help me, the actual title was Tammy, Tell Me True. And maybe that’s part of what makes me nervous about academic novels or campus novels or faculty books or any kind of literature based on the professorate, such as it is: They seem to focus on the incredibly heartbreaking fact that a lot of us never got over being the good student, the one who’s looking for an A, a reward, a compliment, a pat on the back, a good review, or a high ranking on Amazon.

So here’s my question: Are there any books out there that you think do a better job than others of portraying accurately life in the profession? And which books out there are your absolute favorites, whether or not they have anything to do with what so-called real life is like?