The Lecturer's Tale

Once I began reading this hilarious book, I found it very difficult to put it down. It's one of the most enjoyable campus novels I've read in a while. Hynes's delicious, entertaining parodies of contemporary academics are, alas, spot-on: he's merciless when satirizing their narcissism, egomania, and jargon. A reader below said that the novel is an exaggerated version of academic life today, but that just shows that some readers are so absurdly literalist they can't recognize a satire even when it hits them over the head! The pity is that truth occasionally is stranger than this fiction. Hynes could have upped the ante still further, in other words, and he'd still be missing some of the more ridiculous aspects of academic life today. If only English professors weren't so easy to parody!Fortunately for Hynes's readers, they are--and in this novel amusingly easy to identify. The ending is an obvious allegory--it clearly isn't meant to be taken literally, but the warning it conveys has a useful kick to it. Perhaps it might diminish some of the smugness of the people Hynes satirizes. Let's hope so.

This disturbing and frightening novel could better serve the reader if it was twice as long; I could not get enough of it. I couldn't read it slowly enough because I wanted to get all the jokes and I couldn't read it quickly enough because the plot(s) took control of my fingers and moved the pages against my will. A campus novel and a Faustian replay is probably the last book most folks would want to read, but they'd be wrong as I could have been had I not been strangely drawn to the book at a friend's house. I opened at random and laughed out loud. She said she knew I would. And for a few hours and 388 pages I was lost to the rest of the world. Isn't that what we want out of a novel? Somewhere on this page there must be a button that for a modest consideration will send this book to your home. Put your finger on it and press it now. Fret not, I don't know the author from Adam.

Hynes' satire, I'm afraid, has only genius, wit, and charm to recommend it. The indignities of being low man on the totem pole in an environment scrupulously bent on "caring" and other 12-step misplacements have never been set forth so hilariously yet ultimately movingly. The notion that if you're not among the currently fashionable elite (God forbid you should be a heterosexual white male who has his head on straight), you're ripe for guilt-free, even gleeful neglect and mistreatment is most convincingly conveyed through the twists and turns of the plot, which shows the ugliness of hierarchical power divorced from justice. Judgments toward underlings are applied on the basis of whim by those "enlightened" types who wield power. This novel, like recent ones by Roth, Prose, and Coetzee, in its representation of reality, albeit satiric, reveals much more than current academe, in its money grubbing complacency can admit, much less bear.

This is a wonderful sendup of academia, particularly Liberal Arts colleges and the whole field of literary criticism. The book is loaded with puns and literary references, which will be appreciated by the literate reader. Even the protagonist's name is a a joke ("Humbolt's Gift", a tip of the hat to Saul Bellow).While this is a very funny satiric piece, it will probably appeal more to readers who have some exposure to academic life and the quest for tenure, or who have ever broken their teeth on murky postmodern literary crit. It is also fun to identify the real-life models for the archetypal denizens of the fictional Midwest University (The Canadian Lady Novelist can only be one person ...).A highly recommended read, amusing to the point of farce, but clever enough to make you feel the author is winking at you. A "Moo U." for English departments.