So much for the classics; time to break open the juicy stuff
Hadley Hooper for The Chronicle of Higher Education
By Ms. Mentor JULY 03, 2016
Question (from Hegelia): All right, I’ve read some of the books on last month’s list of classic academic novels, filled with profs performing intellectually in their native habitats. But where are the juicy academic novels?
Answer: That depends on what you mean by juicy. For some readers of academic novels, the scholarly in-jokes are the whole point of the genre. These are the sort of readers who chortle about the literary-theory tidbits in John L’Heureux’s The Handmaid of Desire, or claim to know the real-life inspiration for the pushy promoter of Diana Studies in Jennifer Vandever’s The Bronte Project.
Ms. Mentor, however, is a dedicated peasant who prefers academic novels written for all the people, with all the juicy things real people care about power, money, love, sex, justice.
Rona Jaffe’s Class Reunion, for instance, follows four friends from Radcliffe College in the 1950s through a reunion 20 years later. Radcliffe was the sister school to Harvard, which had space, endowment, and endless prestige. While sometimes permitted to attend classes with Harvard men, the Radcliffe girls were considered lesser (the term micro-inequities hadn’t yet been invented). Harvard men could come and go as they pleased; Radcliffe girls had dorm curfews and sign-out rules, including no opposite-sex visitors in their rooms. Ever.
Class Reunion is a page turner. The four Cliffies have intellectual ambitions — to be doctors, journalists, world-changers. They’re bright, lively, and distinctive. There’s one desperate-to-fit-in Jewish girl (Radcliffe had a quota), and one Southern debutante who is ostracized for being promiscuous (a good girl was supposed to save herself for marriage; most didn’t, really).
All of them are taught their place. The would-be physician is advised to be a social worker (more compatible with normal home life). The would-be journalist ekes out a living as a glorified proof reader. The others are also herded into limited lives that won’t use what they learned. Class Reunion is a vibrant and accurate picture of the simmering rage that fueled the women’s movement.
[…]
http://chronicle.com/article/Academic-Novels-for-Real/236981
Question: May we have this column’s list of books, to file in our perfumed memory books with Ms. Mentor’s other academic novel columns
Answer: Certainly (see below).
Here is this month’s shortlist of contemporary academic novels
Frankie Bow, The Case of the Defunct Adjunct
Stella Chance, The Campus Baller A Sports Romance
Ian Flitcroft, The Reluctant Cannibals
Lauren Fremont, Taboo Professor Wants Me Pregnant
Rona Jaffe, Class Reunion
Elle Kennedy, The Score (Off-Campus Book 3)
Alex Kudera, Auggie’s Revenge
John L’Heureux, The Handmaid of Desire
Janice MacDonald, Sticks and Stones
Lucy McConnell, The Academic Bride (Billionaire Marriage Brokers)
Adrian Jones Pearson, Cow Country
John Van der Kiste, Always There
Jennifer Vandever, The Bronte Project
Chris Wallace, Heads A Campus Novel
Tom Wolfe, I Am Charlotte Simmons A Novel