Via Rob Henderson, I read this piece by Chris Jesu Lee about college novels, or the relative lack thereof, which as someone who’s spent thirty-mumble years embedded in elite higher education, I of course had Thoughts about. Lee notes a kind of tension in the American cultural fascination with college and the narrowness of its representations in literature:
Perhaps Americans loathe elitism and elite American colleges, by definition, revel in it. But Americans can never get enough of rich-kid drama, from Cruel Intentions to Beverly Hills 90210 to The OC to Gossip Girl. Shows like Freaks and Geeks and Malcolm In The Middle stand out for being some of the few depictions of working and middle-class high school life. If Americans are averse to elite college narratives but not to privileged-kid ones, then what is it about the former that is so repellant?
In searching for the “college narrative,” I realized that what I was seeking and finding was in fact a very narrowly defined experience, one that had more or less the following elements: (1) an academically bright and culturally ambitious protagonist (2) from some unglamorous tier of the American middle-class (3) for whom college was their stage where they could leverage their academic success into entering a higher social class. Even though the majority of Americans do not attend college, even among the minority of those with a college education, there is a huge range of experiences. But there is a stark contrast between the typical college and high school narratives in our media. Whereas many high school stories are set in anyschool USA, college narratives are almost exclusively set in elite universities, with the Ivy Leagues (especially Harvard) disproportionately overrepresented. Of the novels that I’ve come across in my searches, I can’t think of one set at a state school, much less a directional state school.
I think the simple answer to the question of why there aren’t all that many elite-college novels is just statistics. As has been noted innumerable times in the last week or so, since the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling, schools in the elite college category are a tiny, tiny slice of American higher education, and the number of students from that category who go on to become novelists is a similarly tiny slice. There just aren’t a ton of people out there who have the experience of the weird and intense atmosphere at these schools to write about it in an authentic way. That’s in contrast to the far more universal experience of high school, which almost everybody who goes on to a writing career has had.
Further cutting down the potential range of college novels is the fact that fiction necessarily requires some sort of plot conflict, which kind of narrows the range of experiences that are well-suited to novelization. Particularly if you’re looking for the kind of sociopolitical content Lee talks about, there’s a kind of needle to be threaded: neither the people who hated the experience enough to immediately drop out or transfer nor those who fit right in and loved every minute really have the material for a good book. So a lot of the novelists who went to elite schools actually write about other stuff— one who went to my alma mater is most famous for mystery novels from the point of view of the detective’s dog, for example, and one from our arch-rival is known for thrillers.
Lee lists off and provides capsule summaries of a bunch of books, only a few of which were familiar to me, but that’s mostly because I don’t read mainstream literary fiction very much. The only thing I would think to add would be Tom Perrotta’s Joe College, which I remember reading and liking when it came out (I was a post-doc at Yale, where it’s set, at the time, so that added an interesting element…).
My own fiction reading tends to be in the SF genre (broadly construed), which has the advantage of providing a solution to the need for plot and conflict: you can just introduce some element of the supernatural. It’s not just a novel set at Harvard or Swarthmore, it’s a novel at Magic Harvard or Magic Swarthmore, and that changes the game a bit. You can tell a story about a student who basically enjoys their time in school, but keep it from being boring by having them battle demons or whatever. There still aren’t a ton of these (that statistics thing again), but it is a kind of category.
Of course, there’s still a bit of a problem with getting the balance right. One book in the magic-elite-college subgenre that gets talked up a fair bit is Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, set at an analogue of Carleton College in Minnesota where the faerie court has taken up residence (not really a spoiler, since it’s in the cover copy…). This is a really loving description of a particular kind of small-college experience, but it didn’t really click for me because it was the small-college experience of a group of people from a very different social circle than I hung out with. Not in terms of class, but in terms of interests— they’re Theater Kids, basically— and to the extent that I could map them to people I knew in college, their matches were people I found mildly irritating.
And in the other direction, there are a fair number of magic-college stories about people who clearly didn’t enjoy college. Or are at least playing up the bad elements for purposes that are supposed to be satirical but mostly just end up being grating to me. I suppose their Britishness ought to exclude them from the discussion, but with both the fifth Harry Potter book and Diana Wynne Jones’s Year of the Griffin, there was a sense of axes being ground that I found off-putting. (That wasn’t the only problem with the Order of the Phoenix, but it certainly didn’t help…)
Maybe the most successful of the magic-elite-college stories I’ve read was Lev Grossman’s The Magicians (the TV adaptation has its moments, but really kind of devolved into servicing fans of the show’s versions of Eliot and Margo). It does a nice job capturing the disorientation of moving into the elite-school world (the magic really helps with that), and also features characters who are distracted by the sex-and-drugs aspects of things in a way that I found both resonant and realistic. The sequels also feature one of the best depictions of the “What the hell do I do now?” feeling that (for some) follows graduation. It’s not to all tastes— I know a number of people whose reaction to this was basically the mirror image of mine to Tam Lin, which is absolutely fair— but I liked it an awful lot.
Matt Ruff’s Fool on the Hill is another magic-college-with-booze story that I liked a lot when I first read it. It’s a little shaggier than The Magicians, which is to be expected because it was a really early work for him, but I remember it being fun. It’s set at a fictionalized version of Cornell, too, so there was some bonus resonance with the landscape for me.
I also remember vibing with the first bit of Robert Reed’s An Exaltation of Larks, which would be a bit of a science-fiction version of this, but as I recall it takes a really weird turn after that. I don’t recall it all that clearly, though. Neal Stephenson’s The Big U is also sorta-kinda a sci-fi college story, but more of a satire than a straight novel. In poking around looking for material, I also ran across this ancient review I wrote of The Lecturer’s Tale by James Hynes, which I really liked back in the day but had more or less completely forgotten. That’s getting off toward the faculty side of things, though, which is a different category…
Anyway, I’m not sure I have any grand thesis to offer here, but this was a fun diversion.
If you enjoyed this, you might consider clicking this button:
If you didn’t enjoy it and want to complain, or if you have recommendations of other college novels that I ought to check out (either literary or genre fiction), the comments will be open:
I always wondered why there weren't more TV series and movies about college experiences. Personally, it was the time in my life where I was acquainted with the widest swath of people with different interests, backgrounds, etc. There is no end to the number of high school age stories.
We set out to teach a "college novel" in a course here that was intended to focus on college as a philosophical and practical problem and the one thing we didn't want to teach was a novel that centered on an affair between a professor and a student. This turns out to be *really hard* to do, but one of the few successes we had in one iteration of the class was Grossman's The Magicians. What we really wanted was something that focused on the student experience as per Chris Jesu Lee's critique, but we also hoped to find something that was on the experience of research or scholarship and on the professional lives of faculty. There's a few bad examples of that (Da Vinci Code, etc.) but it was pretty hard to find a good and serious novel along those lines. I tried Pym, which is great, but the second half only indirectly references academia.