July 24, 2014--Groves of Academe

I came to Francine Prose late in life. I have been aware of her but mainly through her essays and book reviews. After hearing her at the recent PEN conference in New York, I thought it was time to take a look at her novels.

From her other writing, I was anticipating that they might be a bit thick and too politically correct for my taste, but the two I've read thus far are anything but. I am only sad I did not begin reading her sooner, but it is exciting to know that there are about a dozen novels altogether and thus I have many months of pleasurable reading awaiting.

Her A Changed Man is about identity and the possibility of self-transformation, even if one has been a neo-Nazi; while Blue Angel is an acerbic satire set on a backwater New England campus where the frustrations of long-term faculty and the self-involvment of their students erupt into a full-scale witch hunt to root out and punish political incorrectness.

While gobbling up Blue Angel I wondered why so many significant authors have set one of more of their novels on college campuses and why most of them are wicked satires, often descending into sarcasm.

The ones I remember from years ago are Mary McCarthy's Groves of Academe and John William's Stoner. Later, I enjoyed Bernard Malamud's New Life, Philip Roth's Human Stain, and Alison Lurie's The War Between the Tates, also Richard Russo's Straight Man and, among the initiators of the genre, Randall Jarrell's 1954 Pictures from an Institution. Biting jeremiads all.

Most of these authors, and many of the dozens of others who have set novels on campuses (David Lodge, Donna Tartt, Jane Smiley), have taught literature and creative writing and, it would seem, for the most part, had miserable experiences among, what to them must have seemed, insecure, petty hypocritical colleagues. Often in settings where male professors pray on the erotic vulnerability of worshipful, cum vindictive, coeds, usually finding themselves hauled before campus vigilante committees seeking to stamp out all signs of transgressive and sexist (and even, often, by distinction, sexual) behavior.

The typical protagonist is a middle-age tenured professor well aware of his declining powers--physical and creative, saddled with debt, culturally isolated, stuck in an unfulfilling marriage, and almost always estranged from his children, children who nearly always include a 20-something daughter just about the age of the students he seduces or allows to seduce him. These obsessive relationships are often presented in parallax perspective--first from the Humbert-Humbert side or, in other cases, Blue Angel among them, with the relationship also viewed by the Lolita-like seductress.

In virtually all the novels, the transgressor has a hard, life-altering fall that is both deserved and, to the transgressor, welcomed since, no matter the public disgrace--often because of it--it is liberating. He shakes off or abandons the comforts that have defined and confined him and this allows him to remake his life, no matter how mean it may seem. In some instances the meaner the better as there is a strong element of expiation required, a fierce price to pay for this liberation.

Again, thinking about why so many meaningful novels are set on college campuses, beyond the obvious--from experiences with which novelists are intimately familiar--they are metaphor-rich environments in which youth and age coexist and clash, where decline is starkly measurable, where things are widely sexualized, where cultural collisions play out naturally and often viscously, and where human nature across its full range is on full flagrant display.

Thus these places are perfect venues to find things to satirize and titilate. All of which writers are incapable of resisting.

May 7, 2014--NY, NY: A Mirror to Nature

He came at us from out of the shadows behind Cooper Union where we had just been at a public discussion between Colm Toibin, Francine Prose, and Salman Rushdie. About literature and freedom and art and truth and rebellion. And worry about the shrinking audience for serious literature. "Only old farts like me will remain," Salman said with an ironic smile.

So we weren't prepared for what felt like an imminent assault, or at least pressure to give him street money, while still with our minds on Toibin and Yates, Lady Gregory and Easter 1916 in Dublin.

From the shadows he seemed darker and more muscular than at first. And taller, towering above my six-foot-three. Even as racist as it may have been to stereotype him, I shivered with fear.

I moved the three of us along, hoping to merge with the crowd ahead bunched up waiting for the light to change. Safety in a crowd, I thought.

Before we could get to safety, he reached toward us. We recoiled, trying to avoid eye contact. But I stepped ahead, toward him, feeling I would try to take whatever brunt might come. We were getting, thankfully, closer to the corner where it was lighter and where there was a cluster of young people.

"Do you know how to kill . . ."

Trembling, I was unable to hear the rest.

"What did he say?" our friend whispered.

"Something about killing," Rona said.

"This is getting very scary," I said. Our friend cringed.

"Do you know how," he repeated, "to kill . . . a mockingbird."

By his pausing I felt relieved--he was playing with, not threatening us. Perhaps knowing where we had just been.

So I took a chance and, trying a smile, said, "I think I do."

He laughed and speed ahead.

"What was that about," our friend said, equally relieved.

"It's a New York story," Rona said. "Maybe he's a street artist."

"I hate those," our friend said, "I like my art in theaters and museums, not on the street."

When we reached the corner, with the light still red, he was waiting for us.

"As Shakespeare wondered," he asked, "when you hold a mirror to nature, what do you see?"

"What?" our friend said now full-voiced. More her old cantankerous self.

"What Shakespeare said about the Mirror of Nature."

"From Romeo and Juliet?"

"Think more," he said. "It's something you need to know the answer to." And with that he darted to the other side of Lafayette Street, avoiding the stream of cars and taxis.

"I think it's from Hamlet," I said, after a moment to think about what had just happened. "I can't remember the context, but we should look it up."

Which, later that night, I did.

In fact, it is from Hamlet. From Hamlet's instructions to the players. He advises--

. . . suit the action to the word, the
word to the action; with this special overstep not
the modesty of nature; for anything so overdone is
from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the
first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the
mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature,
scorn her own image, and the very age and body of
the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone,
or come tardy off, though it make unskilful
laugh, cannot make the judicious grieve  . . .

Overstep not, indeed, I thought.