Volume 32, Number 13 · August 15, 1985
Moveable Types
By Robert Towers
Small World: An Academic Romance
by David Lodge
Macmillan, 339 pp., $15.95
Later the Same Day
by Grace Paley
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 211 pp., $13.95
Self-Help
by Lorrie Moore
Knopf, 163 pp., $13.95
Almost single-handedly, David Lodge has done what many would have thought impossible. He has taken a moribund—some might have said dead—minor genre, the academic novel, from its sickroom, set it on its feet, given it a slap or two, and sent it out to places it has never entered before. The genre was at its best during the 1950s when nonacademic novelists and poets in considerable numbers began to take jobs as 'writer in residence' in institutions of higher learning, particularly 'progressive' ones; often they came away astounded by what they had seen—and eager to tell. Some of the academics themselves, less than enthralled by the scholarly pursuits for which they were trained, decided to try writing a novel—and naturally chose the subject closest to their eyes or spleen. The liveliest productions of that period can still be recalled—and reread—with pleasure: Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe, Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, and that small masterpiece, Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution. At their best, such novels combined exuberant satire of academic types and the positions (both intellectual and hierarchical) they held with a kind of knock-about comedy that often slipped into farce (Lucky Jim cutting up the bed sheets). Occasionally one found, as with C.P. Snow's The Masters, a sober meditation on the workings of academic power.
Review, 3155 words
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