Sex and Violence, a Love Story

Fans of academic novels are more or less like Trekkies, doting on a genre that demands inside knowledge of all sorts of trivial matters to which most of the public is, for good reason, indifferent. The jokes--almost all examples are comical--often seem strained and a bit limp to those outside the charmed circle and the characters invite the disdain owed to folks whose lives are in some sense perpetually adolescent, since they have never really left school. The best such books--Kingsley Amis's classic "Lucky Jim," for instance--are usually tales of escape into the real world, where deans, tenure committees, and the singular banality of academic shop-talk fade into triviality. George Stade's new novel "Sex and Violence" is an exception in that it affirms, in its own quirky way, the value and signicance of the academic life honestly lived, without losing its caustic and sometimes savage satiric bite. It is, in basic outline, a whodunit--three professors get whacked in the course of the action--though, more importantly, it is a tale of redemption and renewal. As in Bellow's "Herzog," the story is told through the eyes and mind of its protagonist, Wynn O'Leary, in a series of letters that will be read only by their writer (they are nominally written to his long-dead brother, a jazz musician destroyed by drugs). O'Leary is a Professor of English in an alternate-universe version of Columbia (the author's home turf). An expert on Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Yeats and the like, the fortyish O'Leary has pretty much gone to seed, joining the undead legions who never publish but, being tenured, never perish either. O'Leary's intellectual stagnation is echoed by his physical decline--a one-time linebacker good enough to have spent some time in the NFL, he is, as the story begins, long-divorced, overweight and, worse, sexually impotent. His life is a stale routine built around cooking, eating and exchanging quips with his cronies in the campus cafeteria. The first of the murders--the victim is the department's medievalist--stirs things up a bit, but not too vehemently. The chief result is to vault O'Leary, if that's the word, into the unwanted job of vice-chairman. More important, however, is the arrival of his anima and redemptress, in the form of a distant relative, Julie, who shows up out of nowhere and moves in with him. The core of the novel is the interaction between these two, which in time cures Wynn of his sloth, his overeating, and his sexual difficulties. In the interim, there are a couple of additional murders--not particularly regrettable--a pathetic suicide, and a kind of cat-and-mouse game with the character whom the reader, if not O'Leary, soon realizes must be the killer. Simultaneously, we see various strivers and poseurs jockeying for power and prestige within the department, a contest as silly and meaningless as it is intense. But this bare outline little hints at the real charm of the book, which lies in its linguistic fizz and i