Dorm Watch

Illustration by Jillian Tamaki.

Anyone who’s set foot on a college or university campus will attest that the experience is transformative. How could it not be? It’s where young minds collide with the duelling forces of tradition and free thought. University’s all about new ideas, new faces (and often, new drugs). It’s where many people find themselves — or, at the very least, slip into some exciting new guise. Save for a hospital birthing room, no place has the potential to so radically alter your worldview.

Lynn Coady knows this. Her shrewd new novel, Mean Boy, concerns a group of students who fall under the drunken sway of a professor at Westcock, a fictional New Brunswick university, in the 1970s. Jim Arsenault is a published poet and uncompromising critic of inferior verse. Surly when sober, impulsive when inebriated, Jim is the sort of prof who brings out the best and the worst in his students. The most ardent of these is 19-year-old Larry Campbell, the novel’s protagonist, a Prince Edward Islander seeking nothing less than poetic transcendence.

Author Lynn Coady. Courtesy Random House of Canada.

An exceptional work on its own merits, Mean Boy also belongs to a rich literary tradition: the academic satire. Set in (and around) institutions of higher learning, these books explore the fraught and often conflicted lives of students and professors. From Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin to Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man to Tom Wolfe’s recent I Am Charlotte Simmons, campus life has inspired a riot of comic fiction. And although novels about frisky freshman go back as far as Owen Johnson’s Stover at Yale (1911), it wasn’t until after the Second World War that authors began to explore the rich tension between learners and the learned. The first proper “campus novel” was Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1952), in which a freethinking literature prof suspects school administrators have it in for him. Coady says Mean Boy was partly informed by Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954), which follows the travails of James Dixon, a junior lecturer at an unidentified English university. While preparing a fateful end-of-term speech on “Merrie England,” Jim must withstand the impositions of his professor, the bluster of the professor’s son and the wiles of the professor’s son’s girlfriend — classic British hijinks.

“I liked the silliness of it,” says Coady in a recent interview. “Say what you want about Kingsley Amis as a person and a novelist, I like that he had the confidence to write a book that was just poking fun at academia.”

One of the easiest and most fertile targets in these novels is the pomposity of academe. Profs in many of these books have an inflated regard for their achievements, oblivious to the fact that their scholarly prestige holds little meaning in the wider world. This theme informs much of the work of British author David Lodge. His 1984 novel Small World followed a cadre of academics who seem to do nothing but attend conventions on literary criticism. As evidence of Lodge’s satirical bite, the book’s climax takes place at an annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. Talk about an insular bunch.

“The academy is a weird place,” Coady says. “It doesn’t operate like the rest of the world. It doesn’t operate like a business. It doesn’t operate like politics, although it’s mired in its own kind of politics. It’s a bit like poetry. It’s a small kind of pond. People who are outside of it don’t understand it at all, don’t know how it works.”

That said, one of the reasons academe lit is so compelling — even to readers far removed from campus life — is that it often captures youth in a state of emotional tumult. Regardless of whether their obsessions have any consequence in the wider world, characters in campus lit always seem to be on the verge of either heart-bursting fulfillment or utter calamity. Think of Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye or Wolfe’s Charlotte Simmons.

Courtesy Random House of Canada.

“I need Jim Arsenault to love me,” Larry pines in Mean Boy, not looking for romantic love, but approbation. “Because that will mean I have worth. That will mean there is a point. That will mean I am not a PEI hillbilly going hyuck-hyuck chawing on a sprig of hay (or in my case maybe a hunk of raw potato), and poking around with his first cousin.”

Jim and Larry’s cozy relationship reflects how social dynamics change at university. Gone, for the most part, are the rigid boundaries enforced in high school; not only are students and profs on a first-name basis, but they get drunk together. In addition to the many visits to the pub, Larry organizes readings for Jim, escorts visiting poets for Jim and puts in a good word for Jim with a dean desperate to be rid of him. He’s an all-around Guy Friday.

This intimacy has its own perils, especially when youthful ambition butts up against middle-age complacency. Francine Prose’s Blue Angel offers a particularly potent demonstration of this. Ted Swenson is a happily married writing prof at a New England university who is drawn to Angela Argo, an unusually gifted pupil. She feeds on her professor’s vast knowledge and literary experience. He’s taken by her natural talent — and alluring youth. Their rapport becomes perilously close and ends up costing Ted much more than his teaching post. A devastating morality tale, Blue Angel ravages the notion that profs are intellectually superior and ethically infallible.

Zadie Smith’s brash, generous On Beauty offers a similar lesson. Howard Belsey, an aging Rembrandt scholar at a New England university, has been married to Kiki for 30 years — but he’s been philandering of late. In a fit of hubris, Howard sleeps with Victoria, the sexually voracious daughter of his sworn enemy, fellow prof Monty Kipps. Like Ted in Blue Angel, Howard hopes that taking a younger lover might help him recapture some of his lost vitality. Their kinky romp, however, ends in abject humiliation; if anything, it makes Howard feel his age more acutely.

Though not quite as shattering, Mean Boy also takes the lustre off the tenured set. Coady, who attended Mount Allison University and the University of British Columbia, says that like her fictional hero, most college kids begin their term with an almost messianic view of profs. “But the more you find yourself nearing the people you worshipped when you were younger, the more you realize they were jerks and losers,” Coady says. “And then you start to register all their follies and their flaws.”

Mean Boy is published by Doubleday Canada and is in stores now.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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