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PARTISAN REVIEW
fiction can provide. In comic novels, timing counts for virtually every–
thing-although it is hard to imagine a successful novel about academe
that does not have an ear to the campus ground and its heart in roughly
the right place. When all its cylinders are working, the result can be a
human drama filled with very fallible human beings. And because ideas
are-or should be-as much a part of the geography as the student center
or the football stadium, these novels provide rich entertainment for those
able to get the allusions and then to calculate how a given writer has used
them. When, for example, a character in an Alison Lurie novel describes
her teenaged children as "nasty, brutish, and tall," those in the know smile
knowingly. Such community is one of the minor benefits of a college edu–
cation, but one that helps us actively to resist the steady downward spiral
of much that passes itself off as contemporary culture. There are, after all,
many ways to deal with the shoddier aspects of mass entertainment: one is
to actively take arms against it, rather like Don Quixote tilting against
windmills; another is to rigorously tend one's rose garden. Yet another, and
one I find enormously attractive, is the bedtime reading of certain novels.
In one form or another, the books I'm thinking about ask me if I care
whether or not Roger Ackroyd gets tenure; and when they're able to work
on
me-really
work on me-I do, I do.
ToNY TANNER
CRITIC AND CONTRIBUTOR
1935 - 1999
