The Lecturer's Tale

Rating:
Summary: brilliant satire
Review: an often funny look at the politics and poetics of a midwestern research university transparently modeled on University of Michigan. Hynes never makes a false step combining realistic, gothic, and satiric modes. Worth rereading.

Rating:
Summary: The Don Quijote of Academia
Review: Don Quixote is said to have done in the chivalrous romance with its wit. I hope the same might be true for some academic post modern arguments and tactics that Hynes rips so incredibly well in his books. I don't know if non-academia readers would fare so well in enjoying this book as much as I did (I reckon it would be a dream for a non-tenured professor to be able to mind control others in his department!). Kudos to Hynes!

Rating:
Summary: Not an advertisement for graduate-level education
Review: Essentially, THE LECTURER'S TALE is a horror story, but it is sometimes difficult to determine what the source of the horror is. Is it the strange, sometimes otherwordly characters and the extraordinary powers some possess, such as the main character: a lowly, untenured lecturer on the fast track to career oblivion who, after a horrible accident in which his finger is severed and then reattached, suddenly gains the power to bend others to his will just by touching them? Or is the horror in the sorry state of academics today -- particularly literature departments, which have forsaken the classic canon for faddish theories and popular culture? Here, it's both. Because while THE LECTURER'S TALE functions nicely as a juicy little horror story, it is also a piercing satire of modern university life, and it must be read as such to be appreciated. But I must offer a warning: This book may be just the thing to convince you not to pursue that Ph.D. after all.

Rating:
Summary: Hynes Scores a Bull's-Eye
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Readable, but disappointing
Review: I've read my share of academic satires; I wasn't a lit prof, but I was an English major, so I have some peripheral involvement with the issues at hand. The problem with this book wasn't so much the plethora of literary references as it was one of focus. What, exactly, did Hynes mean to be writing here? As satire, the book hit its target with some frequency, but the humor was pretty heavy-handed (e.g., most of the characters had "descriptive" last names, like Weissman or Grossmaul or [ugh] Midlist) and obvious. Also, the characters were neither interesting nor even slightly believable. Farce is one thing, but straw men are quite another. David Lodge populated his satirical academia with flawed but appealing characters, so it's hardly out of the question that Hynes could have done so. But even the protagonist (Nelson) isn't memorable, and his "gradual descent into evil" is superficial and unconvincing. We don't even really understand why he has an affair; his relationship with his wife is not depicted as all that troubled, particularly after he "improves" her.

As fantasy/horror, the book didn't go far enough. Now, if you or I got a finger that could make people obey us, we would be using it all over the place, wondering what makes it tick, thinking about the ethics of controlling people, fantasizing about making politicians do what we wanted, etc. But in this book, Nelson hardly uses it, hardly wonders about it, though we are reminded on every other page that his finger burned. And there certainly wasn't enough magic in this little world to justify that horrible, unnecessary, and thoroughly confusing ending.

What kept me reading was Hynes's style, which was lively and appealing, even though I was quite tired of the characters about halfway through the book. I'll read something else by him, but this one isn't going to stay in my collection.

Rating:
Summary: A midwestern odyssey
Review: Like most of the readers of The Lecturer's Tale, I thoroughly enjoyed the satirical spin around our downtrodden protagonist while I was much less interested in the supernatural oddities towards the end. The overwrought emphasis on gender, also, seemed to submerge the plot. However, I am surprised that almost no one has commented on the ultimate corporate status of the university. As an ironic comment on society, I thought it was perfect! I also found it carried tremendous weight as a prediction of our Brave New World; secondary schools are already being transformed by privatization.

If you can get into the spirit of this book, it is a fun read as well as a cerebral brain teaser. No, it doesn't all make sense but James Hynes launches you on a rollercoaster ride of robust storytelling in The Lecturer's Tale.

Rating:
Summary: Good fun and highly literate. A sample of his witty prose:
Review: Nelson travels to the English Composition Department, which is located in a former bomb shelter in the basement, a vast white room full of plasterboard cubicles with the feel of a sweatshop:

"In each cubicle a woman in thrift shop couture sat earnestly tutoring some groggy student in a point of grammer or the constuction of an argument, and each woman looked up at Nelson as he passed with the hollow-eyed, pitiless gaze of the damned. A few composition teachers lived in hope: faculty wives making a little extra money, the department's own Ph.D's teaching a year of comp as they played the job market, MFA students treading water as they finished their novels. But most of the comp teachers were divorced moms and single women with cats who taught eight classes a year and earned a thousand dollars per class, who clung to semester-to-semester contracts with the desperate devotion of anchoresses."

"They combined the bitter esprit de corps of assembly-line workers with the literate wit of the overeducated: They were the steerage of the English Department, the first to drown if the budget sprang a leak. They were the Morlocks to the Eloi of the eight floor. Pace Wallerstein, they were the colonial periphery, harvesting for pennies a day the department's raw material--undergraduates--and shipping these processed students farther up the hierarchy, thus creating the leisure for the professors at the imperial center to pursue their interests in feminist theory and postcolonial literature."

"Passing among them, Nelson knew he stood out like some dissolute white beachcomber in Robert Louis Stevenson. . .every gaze in the place was pointed at his back like a spear."

Rating:
Summary: leaden satire
Review: satirical novel about a middling academic (english PhD) who one day severs his finger in a freak accident. the finger gets reattached, and he slowly realizes that he has acquired a supernatural power: he can make people do anything he wants by touching them. he uses his newfound power to gain a professorship, put himself on the tenure track, and derail his academic adversaries. the escalating scope of his desires ultimately leads to big trouble...

lecturer's tale is intended to make fun of academic culture, identity politics, and postmodern literary theory, and i guess it does. but it's not that great a read. all the characters are caricatures, and this starts to grate on your nerves after about five minutes. does satire have to be painted with so broad a brush? i think not; it's more that hynes has a tin ear for dialogue and he utterly lacks subtlety. i doubt lecturer's tale will elicit many chuckles from non-literary-theorists, but if you're in the english postgraduate program at brown then by all means, dig in.

Rating:
Summary: A hilarious romp through academia
Review: This novel is a well-constructed satire set in academia. The book opens when Nelson Humbolt, a lowly lecturer at a midwestern university, is fired. As he is crossing the quad, he has a freak accident. His right index finger is severed. When it is reattached, he discovers he has mysterious powers. All this happens in the first few pages. From there on, the rest of the book is an hilarious romp which pokes fun at postmodernism, feminism, affirmative action, tenure and everything else that makes up the stuff of what goes on in a university setting. There are a lot of literary references and characters who are exaggerated so much as to become caricatures of themselves. The situations are hilarious and even I, who don't particularly care for comedy, found myself laughing out loud in parts. I can also understand how there is a lot of truth buried in the action. I loved the book until about the last eighth of the story. That's when it went from the sublime to the ridiculous and depended on magic, and not on the characters, to bring it to a turning point. From there on, it was downhill all the way.

Those very well acquainted with academia and literature will adore this book. Others will find it a funny and thoughtful satire. I did enjoy it while I was reading it, but I have to stop short of a high recommendation.

Rating:
Summary: Hynes INVENTS a literary genre!!
Review: When you think about the lit. crit. + theory fad that swept through college humanities departments (no more so than English Depts) in the 1980s and 90s to become a sort of intellectual's Scientology for those who should've known better -- Hynes has struck back with a wicked, uproarious parody, culling cliches and devices from horror and fantasy novels and weaving them into the recent trendy fixations of academia, as well as the hierarchical politics of a midwestern collegiate English Department. Indeed, I cannot think of a better response to the "horrors" of deconstruction, post-colonial studies and radical feminist criticism that probably made a generation of undergraduate students swear off literature for life. And there is a bonus: Hynes is literarily gifted; the book reads well.

If you know something of the trends I've mentioned above and aren't besotted with them, you'll love Hynes's tale. The puns are well-used and the atmosphere of the fictitious University of the Midwest is superbly rendered, caricatured and spoofed. Anyone who has spent some time in a college English department (and especially those grasping for tenure or just another yearly extendion of their contract) will see that Hynes knows his terrain very well.

In closing, I cannot resist including an anecdote from Richard Wollheim, the noted philospher of art who died last year. It provides some perspective from a senior scholar. He recalled that, as a British soldier in WWII, his being taken a prisoner of war by the Germans was only rivaled as the worst experience in his life by his having to listen to an enthusiastic literary deconstructionist in the 1990s.

And more recently, I call your attention to British academic theoretician Terry Eagleton's most recent book, AFTER THEORY. He confesses (repents?) that the sorts of theory that have been all the rage have proven irrelevant to the serious issues of real life.