CAMPUS NOVELS ARE actually getting better, I think. Consider Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution, Mary McCarthy's Groves of Academe, May Sarton's Small Room--all worthy efforts, but they were by tourists, basically.
Modern novelists, for better or worse, often spend a serious chunk of their careers on campuses, and thus bring to the genre an intimacy, a grasp of nuance, a breaking with cliché that one misses in their predecessors. I am thinking of Jane Smiley's Moo, Richard Russo's Straight Man, Julie Schumacher's Dear Committee Members, Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys--the satire remains, as do the Feydeau-like crank-it-up-til-it-explodes plots, but the characters feel more realistic, less caricatured. More of the resources of the novel as a form come into play.
As its title suggests, Dicharry's campus novel features one of those plots (cf. Russo, Schumacher, Chabon, and Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim) in which all the wheels seem to come off at once. Our narrator, Nina Lanning, has become the key staff person at the art school where she earned her MFA. Her boss, the school's director, has suddenly become obsessed with a male model who poses for the covers of romance novels. One of the faculty members, whom a court order has banned from entering the building save when his classes are held, keeps sneaking in and cooking bacon all over the place as a kind off transgressive, performance-art sort of gesture. A 500-year flood threatens to swamp the modernist architectural masterpiece that houses the school and all its contents, including an extremely valuable Pollock. On the home front, her husband wants kids, now, and to prove the point that they would make good parents has asked a Chinese graduate student to move in with them.
There's more, but you get the idea.
Does Nina handle all of this with the cool aplomb and quiet adeptness of the ideal university staff assistant? Well...no. Which makes for great comedy--I laughed out loud quite a few times.
But funny as the novel is--spoiler coming--it becomes moving as well. Dicharry seems to be setting up a comedy-of-remarriage story. The maelstrom through which Nina is passing ("This could the crucial juncture of your psychoemotional journey," one of her faculty friends helpfully points out as several species of shit approach a variety of fans), we begin to assume, will be the crucible through which she rediscovers her creativity, reaffirms her marriage, reclaims her selfhood. But this turns out to be one of those very unusual (in my experience) comedies in which the happy ending involves the couple deciding that no, they should not try to save their marriage, but let it go. It's surprises like these that make me think Dicharry is someone to watch.
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