SANFORD PINSKER
441
In Britain, class differences-based on bloodlines, advantage, and not
least of all, place-defining speech-are a story (perhaps
the
story) that has
few counterparts in America. Kingsley Amis's
Lucky Jim
(1954) is perhaps
the watershed example of what would become a changing landscape. The
new "red brick" universities not only turned higher education into an ana–
log of national health, but also offered up delicious possibilities for talented
British novelists in search of a subject. David Lodge and Malcolm
Bradbury are the names that most often pop to mind-whether one's
favorite happens to be Lodge's
Changing Places
(1975) or Bradbury's
Rates
of Exchange
(1983). Unhke many American novelists who feel that only a
mighty swing for the fences is worth the effort, their Bri tish counterparts
seem less driven by market pressures and the churning ambition to write
their country's version of the Great American Novel. After all, with a
crowded field of
genuine
greats looking over your shoulder-Austen and
Eliot, Dickens and Conrad,]oyce and Lawrence-you can turn out a "jolly
good read" without worrying too much about elbowing yourself into a
latter-day version of
F.
R . Leavis's
The Great Tradition.
By comparison, American writers have fewer precursors to worry
about. The earliest academic novel that American literary history can
offer up is Nathaniel Hawthorne's
Fanshawe
(1828), a book that so
romanticizes the Bowdoin of his college years that he (rightly) tried to
suppress the few extant copies. Granted,
F.
Scott Fitzgerald's
This Side
of
Paradise
(1920) made a splash when its insider account of Princeton as the
" pleasantest country club in America" divided the world between those
who knew what "petting shirts" were and smug Victorian parents who
didn't; but for all the snippets of Triangle Club productions and scream–
ingly bad undergraduate poetry that Fitzgerald shoveled into his pages,
there is precious Ii tde that one could, properly, call an academic novel.
At least two-thirds of its action occurs elsewhere. Wilson, Fitzgerald's
classmate and "intellectual conscience" (Fitzgerald's phrase), dutifully
ticked off the misspellings and the solecisms, and then declared that it
nonetheless had the essential ingredient of genuine fiction: an abiding
sense of
life.
Fitzgerald was clearly onto
something,
although that something would
have to wai t until
The Great Gatsby
for form and content to merge seam–
lessly into an aesthetic whole. And when the ingredients for one of our
most evocative American novels fell into place, it was the secret sharing of
Nick Carraway (late of Yale) with Gatsby (never at Oxford) that gave the
work its tragic resonance. In this regard, Tom Buchanan, the boorish,
perennially adolescent college boy, is reduced to a minor character-good
for corruc relief and a certain amount of social commentary, but decided–
ly not where the novel's real action is.
