Campus griping

Critique: That the rise of the academic novel was matched by the democratisation of university is not coincidental

Critique: That the rise of the academic novel was matched by the democratisation of university is not coincidental. Since Lucky Jim, the genre's codes and in-jokes have become accessible to a wide audience of graduates. That the protagonists are almost invariably English teachers is hardly surprising: a lifetime of analysis sparks an "I could do that" response in many academics.

In many ways, the academic novel is an anatomy of the last 50 years of literary criticism and its politics; this favours its wide appeal since no other subject so closely matches the social history of this time: one of optimism and inclusiveness followed by the world-weary cynicism of the modern condition.

Despite the satire of pedantry we get from Kingsley Amis and the bitterness of Philip Roth, few can fail to love the genre's Madame Bovary campus wives or its underwhelmed, oversexed dons - such delicious figures as David Lodge's Morris Zapp, who dreams of "going on, after fixing Jane Austen, to do the same job on all the other major English novelists . . . spreading dismay through the whole industry, rendering scores of his colleagues redundant".

The academic novel would welcome criticism from a mind inspired by the combination of enthusiasm and professional know-how which often drives academics to produce entertaining books on their pet subjects.

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Sadly, Elaine Showalter is not suited to writing for the general audience. Her style is pedestrian. The chapter dealing with academic novels of the 1950s begins: "The academic novel of the 1950s . . ." Ugly American campus words abound: "model", "pseudosocial", "Beckettish", "macrolevel" - all that is worst about American criticism, with none of the close reading that is its redeeming feature.

Showalter's feminism precludes the latter. It is an all-purpose tool with which she commits the common crime of academics: she is creative at her authors' expense; she has, as Padraic Fallon said, a theory on which to stretch them willy-nilly. John W Aldrige's The Party at Crandon "is particularly cruel to women on campus". This isn't fair. For every "nymphomaniac drunkard" called Dorothy there is an Arthur who writes criticism "the way other men might have beheaded dolls". It never occurs to Showalter that the book would have been askew were not both sexes ludicrous, spiteful and pathetic.

Elsewhere she proposes the "phallic obeisance" and "erotics of rivalry" of CP Snow; or, "what makes Lucky Jim seem contemporary is the presence of women on the faculty". Well, quite. But that's about the least interesting aspect of the book. Nor can Showalter relish jolly David Lodge without whining, "my only reservation about Morris Zapp is that I can't imagine his female equivalent".

This relentless search for gender equivalence is Jurassic feminism. Showalter knows this, as her balanced review of the last two decades shows. Here her selection is wonderfully representative of the cynical, vituperative strain that entered the genre at this time. Her feminism acts as a balance to the anti-PC counterblasts of Mamet, Bellow or James Hynes's brilliant The Lecturer's Tale, a book which explodes the victory of Theory and restates the case for the canon.

Contrariwise, when writing about the period between 1950 and 1990, Showalter always seems contemporary with her subjects and never a post-feminist looking back with what could have been, by turns, sympathy with the cause and, subsequently, dismay at the divisive, philistine waste of energy that feminism became at its worst.

We are not surprised she dislikes Carolyn Heilburn's heroine Kate Fansler, who commits a feminist heresy: "I've never wanted power". The only novel featuring that heretic which Showalter likes is one in which they "talk about the problems plaguing women who had made it". This is a bit rich when you consider that Helen Vendler was at Harvard at the time in question - and also the president of the MLA.

If Showalter could have put her subject before her feminism for more of Faculty Towers, the academic novel might have found its critic. As it is, we get a frustrating guide happy to narrow her vision.

Faculty Towers: the Academic Novel and its Discontents By Elaine Showalter Oxford University Press, 166pp. £12.99

Alan O'Riordan is literary critic with Magill and a freelance journalist and theatre critic