Customer Reviews

The Lecturer's Tale: A Novel

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that the worst minds on a university campus could be located in the English Department (followed closely by Education). James Hynes' cast of characters do little to belie this notion, and they are indeed a fairly accurate, though obviously exaggerated, representation of the sort of jargon-spewing sub-intellects that are tenured in too many English departments on too many American campuses these days. The bywords, "gender, race and class," have come to represent the core of the department curricula on any given campus, from junior colleges to major universities. Hynes takes these prevalent trends and skewers them delightfully.

Even those who don't normally find academic satire their usual cup of tea will find kernels of truth and true wit in this cerebral romp. As in all true satires, the characters are more representational than dimensional, yet they still are fleshed out vividly enough that one believes them true to type. Some reviewers have objected to the fact that none of the characters in <The Lecturer's Tale> are likeable. This again, is a device of true satire. Is it necessary that we "like" Gulliver in order to appreciate Swift's great comic vision? Gulliver behaves abominably in many situations. So too does Hynes' protagonist, Nelson Humboldt (just one of the myriad literary references that are scattered throughout the novel). Humbodlt is himself a representation of "***hole Lit," that Nelson plans to expound upon in a future dissertation (a study including the "lovable ****ups of modern American fiction: Fitzgerald's Gatsby, Bellow's Herzog, Updike's Harry Angstrom, Percy's Binx Bolling, John Cheever's Falconer, Richard Ford's Sportswriter)". The literary referents do fly by rather blazingly in this novel, particularly in the belfry scene towards the end, though Hynes does clear things up for the reader in a kind of appendix. I caught the Milton and Shakespeare references, but didn't recognize the Plato or Thomas Hardy, but you needn't keep a scorecard or be a literary savant to enjoy the story.

There've been several comments by reviewers here that the ending is inordinately weak versus the first 300 pages. It may be that some readers are missing the point as to what Hynes is up to here. The Vita/Robin/sprite segment represents a literal rendering of deconstructionism. The plot, in fact, the whole fabric of the story breaks down and explodes in so many scattered shards, just as the physical construct of the library does. Hynes is actually engaging in the same sort of self-referential byplay in which the theorists whom he here ridicules regularly engage. In other words, this breakdown is an authorial choice and serves as part of a playful, complex authorial scheme. It's one of the book's strengths, rather than weaknesses.

If you're looking for reading that will take you away for a while from some of the grim realities we have been facing the past months, give this marvelous escape a try. Again, even those who generally abhor fiction with academic backdrops (myself included), will find something to love about this book. It is a plain, old-fashioned hoot.

If I only had the first half of this book to read, it would earn an easy five stars. The descriptions are familiar, the despair understandable, the topsy-turvy heirarchy both funny and poingnant. I laughed, cried, and cursed in the early parts of this book, in sympathy, empathy, delight and disgust... But then the book got silly. It wasn't just about Nelson's power, it became something past parody to utter stupidity. The last third of the book is not only unconvincing, but also bizarre. It lacks the robustness and reference that the first part of the book has. I'm sure someone could make a parallel to an academic life, but I was turned off by the time the library was burning down. I suppose this book is worth reading, but the first part was an absolute joy, the last part a chore.

Written by the author of the wonderful The Wild Colonial Boy and the wicked Publish or Perish, The Lecturer's Tale is a academic-life fantasy which gets ever more outlandish and wild as the story careens almost out-of-control. Hynes fills his tale chock-full of references to mid-west colleges such as the University of Michigan, so an insider's knowledge of these places only adds to the delightfully demonic humor with which Hynes scalds his subjects.

I found Hynes's book refreshing and got much pleasure seeing his writing become more & more on the edge. He caused me to laugh out loud at many of his increasingly absurd situations and terrifically complex academic intrigues. An especially enjoyable and inventive novel!

This is, without a doubt, the best satire of academia I have ever read. Luckily, I spent four years at college in the Eastern United States, so I can really understand Hynes' characters and their dilemmas.

You can't get much more cynical than Hynes does in The Lecturer's Tale. This book is, by turns, dark, delirious, hilarious and wicked. The protagonist is mild-mannered Nelson Humboldt, a visiting assistant professor in English at "Midwest University." When it comes to career choices, Nelson proved to be the ultimate fence sitter, straddling poststructuralism on the one side and traditionalism on the other. Nelson's days of fence sitting, however, are about to come to an end.

At Midwest, Nelson loves to spend his time sitting in the library's old clock tower (read Ivory Tower) where the university chooses to keep all the novels by "dead, white males." He keeps rereading and reresearching books and articles he knows he will never publish, although he chooses not to face that fact--just yet.

After being unceremoniously fired, by a female no less, Nelson is involved in a freak accident under the clock tower in which his right index finger is severed. Once it is reattached, Nelson makes the grand discovery that it (and thus he) have the power to make others do exactly as he wishes. Nelson beings to plot the very thing he thinks he wishes for the most--his return (in a blaze of glory) to "Midwest."

I think Hynes blames some of Nelson's problems on feminism. It is no accident that the book's two leading female protagonists have names that begin with the letter "V," Victoria Victorinix and Vita (whose very name means "life"), a strong proponent of gender theory whose own gender can certainly be called into question. It is also no mistake that the new library, the library where all the modern theorists are housed, is shaped in the form of a large letter "V." In fact, Nelson likes to contemplate this V-shaped annex, but only when safely tucked away in the ivory citadel of the old clock tower.

Does Nelson get what he wants? Sort of. Sort of, yes and sort of, no. Let's just say that when he wins, it is not traditionalism that produces his victories and when he loses, it is not poststructuralism that produces his loss. There is yet another evil on the horizon, one that Nelson never counted on battling. Ultimately, Nelson gets what Nelson deserves.

Those who thought Hynes let his readers down with the ending probably haven't spent much time in English or Comparative Literature Departments. The ending is absolutely perfect and epitomizes just what is going on in universities all across the United States today. If you love the book, but just don't understand the end, ask an English major. This is really too good to miss.

Hynes' writing is a delight. This is real satire, dark and cynical, but hilarious, too. I found myself laughing uproariously at the thought of all my former literature professors scowling at the recognition of themselves in Hynes' characters.

If you love satire, black comedy, or have any familiarity at all with university life, read The Lecturer's Tale. It really doesn't get any better than this.

First, this is an important book, a book that should be pressed into the palm of every academic in the Humanities. It is, by turns, hilarious and yet very sad. As with the novels of David Lodge, what looks like satire to the average reader looks more like documentary to those who inhabit the enclosed world under examination. There are also allegoric elements and touches of the roman à clef. Many of the characters in this novel have specific real-world counterparts and they are not difficult to identify. The sadness comes when one realizes the accuracy of the delineation and its proximity to actual circumstances. As the commentary of other reviewers makes clear, the ending is problematic. Although it can be explained, the elements from separable genres which Hynes assembles and the dose of magic realism he adds to the mixture never quite coalesce. The result is that our response to the novel's conclusion is intellectual, while earlier sections of the novel bring on both tears and stomach pains (from laughing). A putatively academic book that is actually very visceral and deeply human ends on a more academic note. Blatant errors of fact (e.g., with regard to the actual governance of universities and the lines of legal authority therein) are unfortunate, since Hynes's knowledge of literature is broad and deep and his understanding of current fads and intellectual enormities is stunningly accurate and precise. The book is still a must-read and some of the portraits (Lester Antilles listening to Kenny G.) are unforgettable. Buy this book.