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The Droves of Academe

As an academic in training, I’m supposed to resist broad claims, but I’d like to begin with one: the novel is an essentially educational form. I don’t mean that novels are didactic (though they can be), but learning is built into them, whether the characters learn or the readers or both. Narrative tends to break life into lessons, be they epiphanies, false epiphanies or Aesop-like morals. In the twentieth century, the post–World War II boom in college education, aided by the G.I. Bill in the United States and similar measures in physically and economically devastated Britain, bred what we now call the academic novel. Two definitive examples, which I’ll write about here, are Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim and Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe. Both these books possess the crucial genetic feature of their inheritors: brutal and caring satire, an element that established the genre and that distinguishes some of the best-known academic novels that have come since: Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Jane Smiley’s Moo, Richard Russo’s Straight Man, Robertson Davies’s The Rebel Angels, Francine Prose’s Blue Angel. The preponderance of academic novels has led to several book-length studies, most recently by prominent literary critic Elaine Showalter in Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents. All academic satires echo in some way the conventions established by Kingsley Amis’s best-known novel, Lucky Jim. Those conventions range from its bitter protagonist, Jim Dixon (bitter about his tenuous, untenured university position), to the social and structural hierarchies within academic departments to the awkward interactions they necessitate. In the novel, unhappy Jim kowtows to the superiors he dislikes, most notably the head of his department, The Droves of Academe