Murder at the Mla: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: murder as a sidebar
Review: This book is only ostensibly a murder mystery, and is actually an excuse for the pseudonymous author to savage the prevailing subcultural norms of the academy. And I say 'more power to her!' And I am merely guessing at the gender of the author.

The murders themselves are often thrust into the background for pages on end as Boaz Dixon, homicide detective, and Nancy Cook, assistant professor of English at Yale, discuss the dysfunctional social structure and behavior of professors of English and comparative literature. When I started reading the book I was hoping that it would be more of a satire of post-modern posing among academics and that theme is in here, but "Jones" has a broader axe to grind and lets Prof. Cook lay into many aspects of the academic life. Cook's jeremiads on academia are made a believable part of the plot by the author's description of how very foreign the social norms and jargon of the academic community are to Dixon, a working class kid from Chicago with two years of college in his distant past. You can see that he really does need to know all of this in order to solve the crimes that have taken place in this community. The scene where Prof. Cook explains the manipulative placement of the coffee cart in a room where an interview takes place is hilarious precisely because it is so true and so barbaric.

The writing is occasionally uneven, but the passages that involve interaction between Dixon and Cook are funny, suggestive and deftly paced. The descriptions of the Chicago cops and the English professors are also very funny, but perhaps relied a bit too much on stereotyping.

I never stopped caring about how the plot would develop (i.e., who killed these professors?), but I was much more interested in who Boaz Dixon and Nancy Cook were and how their relationship would (or would not) develop.

This book has helped me (an academic) remember how to explain what I do and why I do it to my numerous non-academic friends. For that I thank D.J.H. Jones, whoever s/he is.

Rating:
Summary: murder as a sidebar
Review: This book is only ostensibly a murder mystery, and is actually an excuse for the pseudonymous author to savage the prevailing subcultural norms of the academy. And I say 'more power to her!' And I am merely guessing at the gender of the author.

The murders themselves are often thrust into the background for pages on end as Boaz Dixon, homicide detective, and Nancy Cook, assistant professor of English at Yale, discuss the dysfunctional social structure and behavior of professors of English and comparative literature. When I started reading the book I was hoping that it would be more of a satire of post-modern posing among academics and that theme is in here, but "Jones" has a broader axe to grind and lets Prof. Cook lay into many aspects of the academic life. Cook's jeremiads on academia are made a believable part of the plot by the author's description of how very foreign the social norms and jargon of the academic community are to Dixon, a working class kid from Chicago with two years of college in his distant past. You can see that he really does need to know all of this in order to solve the crimes that have taken place in this community. The scene where Prof. Cook explains the manipulative placement of the coffee cart in a room where an interview takes place is hilarious precisely because it is so true and so barbaric.

The writing is occasionally uneven, but the passages that involve interaction between Dixon and Cook are funny, suggestive and deftly paced. The descriptions of the Chicago cops and the English professors are also very funny, but perhaps relied a bit too much on stereotyping.

I never stopped caring about how the plot would develop (i.e., who killed these professors?), but I was much more interested in who Boaz Dixon and Nancy Cook were and how their relationship would (or would not) develop.

This book has helped me (an academic) remember how to explain what I do and why I do it to my numerous non-academic friends. For that I thank D.J.H. Jones, whoever s/he is.