The Lecturer's Tale: A Novel [Hardcover]

James Hynes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 8, 2001

The author of Publish and Perish returns with a Faustian tale of the horrors of academe

Nelson Humbolt is a visiting adjunct English lecturer at prestigious Midwest University, until he is unceremoniously fired one autumn morning. Minutes after the axe falls, his right index finger is severed in a freak accident. Doctors manage to reattach the finger, but when the bandages come off, Nelson realizes that he has acquired a strange power--he can force his will onto others with a touch of his finger. And so he obtains an extension on the lease of his university-owned townhouse and picks up two sections of freshman composition, saving his career from utter ruin. But soon these victories seem inconsequential, and Nelson's finger burns for even greater glory. Now the Midas of academia wonders if he can attain what every struggling assistant professor and visiting lecturer covets--tenure.

A pitch-perfect blend of satire and horror, The Lecturer's Tale paints a gruesomely clever portrait of life in academia.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Splicing a demonic strain into the usual elements of academic comedy, Hynes's novel, following his acclaimed Publish or Perish, reads like David Lodge rewritten by Mikhail Bulgakov. After Nelson Humboldt (the lecturer in question) is dismissed from his lowly position as a composition teacher at a Midwestern university, he suffers an accident that severs his right index finger. When the finger is surgically reattached, Nelson discovers he can magically control a person's behavior by touching them with his mysteriously burning digit. His first act is to get reappointed to his post by the woman who fired him--Victoria Victorinix. This is only the warmup. Someone is sending scurrilous anonymous letters to members of the department, and the department chairperson, Anthony Pescacane, has fingered the poet-in-residence, Timothy Coogan, as the man. Nelson "persuades" Coogan to resign, thus opening up a tenure-track position. This job, Nelson decides, should go to his office mate, Vita Deonne, a skittish woman working on "Dorian Gray's Lesbian Phallus." Nelson's new seat on the hiring committee puts him in a key spot to broker the ideological fracture in the department, which pits Morton Weissman's Arnoldian humanism against Pescacane's contingent of cultural theorists, who include a woman who shows porn films to her class and a bizarre Serb with a costume fetish. As Nelson, like some usurping Prospero, begins strategically to instill fear into his colleagues by changing their reality, he attracts the attention of Pescacane's departmental paramour, the luscious Mirando DeLa Tour. Nelson's support for Vita fades as he makes a self-interested pact with Victoria. He also, unforgivably, uses his finger to control his wife, Bridget. In Hynes's ferocious parable, partial power corrupts absolutely. Author tour. (Jan.)Forecast: As Jane Smiley's spoof of academia, Moo, and David Lodge's novels have shown, satires of academic manners can reflect the foibles of society at large. Hynes's witheringly literate dark comedy should be a campus hit this spring, and word of mouth potential could lead to mainstream sales.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

This macabre, sort of magic realist satire takes dead aim at some of the pretensions of the academic world, notably among English professors. The protagonist is Nelson Humboldt, a once bright star in the English department at Midwest University but now reduced to teaching composition classes. Never one to publish much, Nelson's academic career is on the verge of perishing. That is until he realizes he has accidentally (in the literal sense) acquired a magic power over people that allows him to bend them to his will. Hynes paints a good picture of the paranoia of the junior faculty as well as the pomposity of New Critics, postmodernists, deconstructionists, and various types of gender benders. The book spins a little out of control by the conclusion, but by then he's achieved his goal of turning a likable character into a megalomaniac while still maintaining the reader's sympathy. Frank Caso
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Picador; 1st edition (January 8, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312203322
• ISBN-13: 978-0312203320
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (62 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,304,696 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hynes Scores a Bull's-Eye, December 15, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Lecturer's Tale: A Novel (Hardcover)

Hynes's previous book, "Publish and Perish," was an academic satire like "The Lecturer's Tale," but "P & P" had stronger supernatural elements, and in any case was composed of three discrete novellas. "The Lecturer's Tale" has more than a touch of the supernatural, too--indeed, spookiness is an essential part of the plot--but as a novel it's more of a unified whole, and consequently succeeds brilliantly as pure satire, with or without ghosts. In its merciless mockery of modern academic trends--literary theory, deconstruction, identity politics, and the like--and in its shrewd understanding of human ambition and the absurd machinations people resort to for the sake of promotion, fame, and the respect of others, "The Lecturer's Tale" stands head and shoulders above others in the genre. It makes Hynes a worthy claimant to the late Malcolm Bradbury's mantle as the dean of academic satirists. It certainly made this reader wary of ever having anything to do with university English departments. Yet, despite its mockery, it's not a mean-spirited book. Hynes is a compassionate writer, sometimes excessively so; indeed, one of the book's few weaknesses is the extent to which he occasionally bends over backward to demonstrate even-handedness, setting up somewhat clichéd villains such as the sexist drunken Irish bard and the supercilious old-school Jewish intellectual as if to emphasize the objectivity of his satirical vision elsewhere. But these are quibbles. Overall, "The Lecturer's Tale" is a masterpiece of plotting, satire, and storytelling, and a real page-turner to boot, with one or two comic sequences reminiscent not only of Bradbury but of Kingsley Amis at his most incisive.

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Perfect Sendup, December 14, 2000

By 

Shirley Braley "ravenous reader" (Arlington, MA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Lecturer's Tale: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Irrational Hierarchy, December 23, 2000

By 

Stanley H. Nemeth (Garden Grove, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Lecturer's Tale: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.