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PARTISAN REVIEW
audience for novels about academe continues to increase. Those outside the
ivory tower cannot have entirely escaped the national media's obsession
with campus turmoil and contentiousness, and they must wonder if out–
bursts of intolerance or just plain foolishness have, in fact, become as much
a part of contemporary college life as raccoon coats and whiffenpoof songs
once were. Novelists not only give readers the illusion of an insider look,
but also do it with the sugared coating that has always made a good piece
of fiction preferable to a dry sociological text.
Better yet, when faced with accusations of "unfairness," novelists-unlike
your garden variety scholar-can always fall back on the old-as-the-hills
defense that imaginative visions have their own rules. What matters for
L'Heureux is how good-which is also to say, how "true"-his writing is.
And in the case of
The Handmaid oj Desire,
it strikes me as very good
indeed, something that Wilson could not claim for stories about who offed
Roger Ackroyd. When the political storm clouds at L'Heureux's fictional
university darken and an untenured faculty member is on the very edge of
being sacrificed, we find ourselves caring-about an individual character
more sinned against than sinning, and about the larger context in which
judgments about him are made casually and without a smidgen of remorse.
The poor bloke's antagonists have their eyes squarely fixed on the big pic–
ture and the main chance; and if this means axing somebody to get the
department of theory they want, so be it.
If
The Handmaid oj Desire
is a send-up of life at a hot academic center,
Richard Russo's
Straight Man
is a saga of those who occupy a spot well
down the intellectual food chain. On its best days, fictional West Central
Pennsylvania University is mediocre, and perhaps not even that. As tempo–
rary chairperson of the English department, William Henry Devereaux,Jr.
(son of a one-time king of American literary theory) tells it as it is when
he talks to his Dean: "Mediocrity is a reasonable goal for our institution."
Small wonder that Devereaux has a long-standing reputation as a pain in
the ass-among administrators and fellow department members alike. He
is also one of the more memorable curmudgeons I have encountered in
years. Here, for example, is his "take" on faculty meetings:
Despite having endured endless faculty meetings, [ can't remember
the last time anyone changed his (or her!) mind as a result of reasoned
discourse. Anyone who observed us would conclude the purpose of
all academic discussion was to provide the grounds for being further
entrenched in our original positions.
