Customer Reviews

Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Hynes offers up an at-times macabre blend of witchcraft, paranoia, and petty campus politics in three short stories/novellas. My conclusions are equally mixed.

As one with no special love for cats, for me the first story was frustratingly driven by an irksome feline, although producing more comic relief than terror. The second story, very much an homage to Edgar Allen Poe (and acknowledged by the author to be based on another, earlier short story), became transparent early on, stripping the story of surprise and leaving the rest of the story to reveal the grisly details. The third work, remarkably woven into the first two, a la David Lodge, was the best of the three, although witchcraft had more to do with the results than any academic talent or story.

Characters are well drawn and the context provides a realistic setting for the work: offices, conferences, professors' lodging, and campus landmarks. Hynes obviously has spent a lot of time on campus.

Universities provide fertile ground for stories. Professors use their skills, especially in the humanities, to build their resumes and to poke fun at the foibles of academic life. And, given that there seems to be more time absorbed by sex and sordid affairs than by teaching or doing any research, writing anything at all must seem miraculous to the reader. But rare be the campus treatise that captures the life of an academic. "Luck Jim", "Groves of Academe" and others have been popular but quite unrealistically overdrawn. Richard Russo's deft "Straight Man" is the best and funniest university novel I've read. As an academic myself, the concept of "Perish" had a dark appeal and, while I read it quickly, I felt more relieved than rejuvenated at the end.

If Edgar Allen Poe were a junior faculty member in a highly political department, this might be the kind of collection he'd write. James Hynes takes the old adage "publish or perish" to its most extreme and literal conclusion in these three novellas. In all three stories, a character's quest for academic credibility puts him or her in peril. Also in all three stories, the postmodern juts up against traditional academia, sometimes with gruesome results.

This is a fast read, perfect for the chilly nights of late fall when the wind howls `round the window frames and your motivation to grade those midterm finals is waning. And unless someone at work is actively planning your death, it'll make you feel better about your own department politics, whatever they may be.

I've read the first and the last of the stories in this volume, and both have their pleasures. In some ways I am fascinated by the way Hynes has been very imitative (his academic satire is cut very much from the David Lodge cloth and his spooky stuff comes straight from Poe and M.R. James), but, by combining imitations of two usually separate genres, he has produced something quite original. Anyone who has been to grad school in the humanities or social sciences since the early '80's will have a lot of fun with this book. But don't neglect to read the real "Casting the Runes" by M.R. James, one of the great ghost stories, which contains some sly academic humor too

Publish and Perish comprises three creepy novellas, all involving professional academics with roots in the University of the Midwest in Hamilton Groves, MN. Each tale is a spooky satire on the cut-throat intrigues that characterize contemporary academe. "Queen of the Jungle" deals with the unusual fallout from a career-driven commuter marriage, including marital infidelity, feline incontinence, and gypsy mysteries, but it does so without providing one likable character. "99" (which begins on page 99---talk about good typesetting!) relates the misadventures of one Gregory Eyck, an arrogant and downwarly mobile cultural anthropologist (with tenure!) who inadvertantly ends up doing fieldwork on neo-pagan sacrifice---from the inside. Though the story was fun, it was definitely derivative of the classic novel and film "The Wicker Man." The last, longest, and arguably best story, "Casting the Runes," is based upon names and ideas in the M.R. James ghost story of the same name. In it a young postmodern historian fights not only for tenure, but for her very life, against an eldritch elder professor who will stop at nothing to maintain his career. All in all a fun, spooky, intelligent, but disposable read.

What fun! Hynes skewers academia so piercingly that I laughed out loud while reading his novellas. Some of the characters--especially characters in the first and third novellas--are loathsome, and it was fun to see them get their comeuppance. Hynes portrayal of academic conferences is so on-target that those in the academy should squirm. His twist on Poe's stories was clever, especially the riff on The Black Cat. The Cask of Amontillado is hinted at in spots of the second novella, but the allusions are weaker. Good summertime reading for anyone missing life in the university.

This collection of three novellas gets points for creativity and occasional moments of disconcerting humor, but the stories aren't really that scary and tend toward the predictable. Hynes' unusual milieu is the strangely stressful world of academia, in which aspiring professors think in fatuous postmodern gibberish about the deconstruction of texts or gender as performance, and your career is over if you can't get your dry paper published in a crusty journal that is only read by other professors. I have been in graduate school so I've been exposed to this useless angst, and quickly decided that it was not the life for me. Hynes writes about the darker impulses of those who have few goals except gaining academic tenure and cruelly crushing their competitors, in pursuit of meager professional rewards. There can't be that many fiction writers working within this subject matter, though the first two stories here don't really do anything interesting with it. "Queen of the Jungle" is little more than a cranky mid-life crisis yarn, while "99" is predictable and contrived, with nonsensical character development and a climax that you can see coming from a mile away. "Casting the Runes" is the most successful story here, dealing with witchcraft and professorial politics, and Hynes deserves credit for the hilarious scene in which riot grrrls storm a moribund academic conference. These stories are hardly pinnacles of the terror genre, but Hynes does creatively examine this world whose inhabitants are under a great deal of stress and angst, which no one out in the real world could possibly care about. [~doomsdayer520~]

I found this title on a list of recommended academic satire, and the premise sounded too promising to pass up. In similar books I've read recently (Moo, Straight Man, Small World), the level of writing skill is deliciously high - perhaps because the authors themselves teach the craft.

The influence of HP Lovecraft on the author is obvious, even before he drops a reference to Miskatonic University. The plots and execution of the tales, however, are disappointingly and distractingly clumsy, compared to those of Lovecraft and other writers of academe.

All three stories are told from the third person in roughly the same voice, they are predictable, and there are strange inconsistencies that an editor should have caught. In the first story there is a "teaching assistant" who is later referred to as a "postdoc." Which is he?

Overall, I'd have to recommend giving this book a pass, unless you are tolerant of thin plots, clumsy foreshadowing, and cardboard characters. Go re-read The Dunwich Horror, instead.

When I went to see my doctor about stress-related problems I was having after the head of my graduate committee tried to have me expelled for writing a paper she disagreed with, the doctor prescribed this book. It ranks with the best medical advice I've ever got.

I've recommended this book to dozens of people - one of whom seems to have borrowed my copy and taken it with him to a post-doc position... I don't have the heart to ask for it back, as I think he'll need it, so I'm ordering a new one for myself. And I can't wait until "The Lecturer's Tale" comes out in paperback.

Other reviewers have mentioned that Hyne's work isn't very realistic; that's true, and I see this as a strength. This is fiction of the absurd. In each novella, unscrupulous wielders of some measure of academic power meet very strange, and strangely apt, retribution. If you've ever suffered at the hands of academia, these oddly appropriate, dark fantasias of justice may be as appealing (and healing) to you as they are to me.

I do think that the "terror" of the tales may be dependent on the reader having academic experience; maybe even, more specifically, academic experience in the era of postmodernism and in a field that takes postmodernism seriously. Chemists at land-grant universities, for instance, may not find them as chillingly germane as literature theorists in the Ivy league, although I'd guess that all of the above and more will enjoy them.

I'd have to agree with other reviewers that the plots are fairly transparent. The middle story, in particular, is predictable. But I think the appeal here is not that you can't guess what's going to happen, but rather that you *can*, and that you just can't wait.

I received Hynes' book as a Christmas gift and initially thought it contained true horror stories from the academic world. I enjoyed the author's ability to mix the professor's world with the supernatural. I especially enjoyed the first and third stories because they were more clearly based in a college setting. The second story was somewhat obtuse and loaded with details I didn't find interesting. I agree with other reviewers who said the stories were somewhat predictable. I liked the blending of mystery, ghosts, and academic references. Hynes is a talented writer who engaged me completely in his plots. I will look for more work from him.

Brilliant! I started this book with zero preconceptions. In fact, I couldn't even remember how it ended up on my bookshelf. But I thought it was terrific. Very good stories and story-telling. In fact, some of it reminded me of some of Patricia Highsmith's writing: everything's normal, but you know something very creepy is actually happening or about to. They do a wonderful job of capturing academia - literally down to the footwear. And great language. Laugh out loud funny! My poor husband was woken more than once by my giggles and guffaws, and then of course I'd have to read him whatever it was that made me laugh. Finally, though the stories have very different tones, settings, characters, and certainly stand alone, the interconnections are delightful.

****

And is it a coincidence that "99" starts on p.99? Love the joke, but why IS it peculiarly American?...