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sense, most academics-and certainly most academic novels-are deeply
conservative in temperament, no matter how many passionate denials are
likely to pour in from those who think of themselves as world-shaking
types, but who, in truth, simply want their assigned campus parking space
to stay right where it is, thank you very much.
In
All the King's Men
(1946), Robert Penn Warren's meditation on pol–
itics in America, nothing quite matches the effect of a phone call that
begins, "All hell's breaking loose." Jack Burden, Boss Willie Stark's resi–
dent dirt-gatherer, is usually the person on the other end of the line, and
for a very long time he believes that this excitement beats finishing his dis–
sertation in history hands-down. But I wonder about this, even as I
continue to admire Penn Warren's novel-for if daily life in politics, or for
that matter on the stock exchange floor is defined as an endless series of
heart-pounding moments, don't they soon become commonplace, pre–
dictable, perhaps even a touch boring? Not so with academic life, where a
genuine crisis is precisely what one prays for, and what college novels serve
up in oversized helpings. Here,
C.
P.
Snow's
The Masters
(1951) might be
considered the template from which countless imitations have been struck:
an election has been called to decide who the new Master will be, and that
is quite enough to ensure a stomach-churning academic season. What
might strike non-academics as a tempest in a teapot leads inexorably to
enormous expendi tures of fretful energy and intrigues worthy ofJacobean
drama. At last, something to gossip about that has real consequence, to say
nothing of juice!-that is, until Snow pulls out the rug from under his
characters by making it clear that nothing has changed (or ever really
would), no matter who happened to win the requisite number of votes.
They have, in effect, thrown heaps of time down a black hole. Still, the
exci tement generated was, well,
exciting.
At this point, let me shift the focus back to American academic nov–
els and reconsider two hearty perennials of the form: McCarthy's
Groves
of
Academe
and Malamud's
A New
Life-not by way of adding more praise to
that which has rightly accumulated over the decades, but rather to see how
they might be tailored to fi t the present moment. McCarthy's novel
revolves around the efforts of Henry Mulcahy to get his contract renewed.
He is, despite some publication and a Ph.D., still an instructor-somebody
hanging on at Joceyln College by his fingernails. His termination notice
prompts desperate action, and since Mulcahy has always been something of
a
poseur,
able to spout intellectual doctrines that he does not believe in, he
fixes on the widely shared myth that he is, or has been, a Communist.
Playing
that
card in the age of McCarthyism, he can depend on other fac–
ulty members to rally around his cause--which, of course, is exactly what
they do. No matter that strictly academic considerations are called for, or
