Your Book Guide to University: The Campus Novel

Student life has always been fruitful territory for writers: from Kingsley Amis’s comedic look at the pretence of academia in Lucky Jim (1954) to Muriel Spark’s disturbing depiction of an Edinburgh schoolteacher in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). The campus novel genre, where the action centres on the goings-on of the university institution, became popular in 1950s post-war America and, as with many other cultural products (Pop-Tarts and superhero movies included), quickly crossed the Atlantic.

The heady mix of an enclosed space, institutional rules, competing ideas and an inbuilt power relationship between tutor and pupil provides the key elements for a great narrative. With this in mind, we take a look at what bookish folk have to say on university life (note: this ‘advice’ may not serve you well).

On romance

Literary wisdom would have it that you’ll inevitably become embroiled in an awkward love triangle. Amid the freshers week bombardment of free shots and awkward silences, you may find yourself romantically entangled with different people – advisedly not two people sharing your living space.

Pulitzer Prize-winner and king of the coming-of-age novel Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot (2011) depicts a trio of clever Ivy Leaguers juggling questions of semiotics with the writings of Plato. The protagonist, Madeleine, who is an English major “for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read,” is forced to choose between Mitchell, a dutiful character who adores her and Leonard, an erratic and self-destructive science major. Similarly, Starter for Ten (2003), by David Nicholls, sees naïve, working-class Brian Jackson caught in a tricky situation between love interests – all the while obsessively collecting knowledge for the unnamed institution's University Challenge team.

Eugenides and Nicholls draw upon the romance plots of some of England’s renowned writers – Jane Austen in the case of the former and Thomas Hardy in the latter – in a bid to refresh the narratives for a modern audience. Both books take apart the prescribed nature of the romantic novel and question the concept of love in the age of dating apps and social media. In the end, Madeleine shows a good deal of foresight in her use of an Anthony Trollope quote: “There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.”

On your fellow students

On that cheery thought, we move on to those people you'll be living with; yes, possibly the Ralph Lauren-clad, Prosecco-popping people in the room next door. The campus novel constantly returns to the idea that the wealthy, academic elite will fascinate and repel you in equal measure. Donna Tartt’s debut novel, The Secret History (1992) – which is as beautifully written and enthralling as you would expect from someone who famously takes up to ten years to finish a novel – follows Richard Papen as he becomes a member of an exclusive group of Classics students and is swiftly embroiled in their pagan rituals, clique politics and, ultimately, murder.

The five Greek scholars making up the sect strive for academic genius, while alienating themselves from the wider student population and having a fondness for all-white clothing. Papen finds the behaviour of the group increasingly bizarre and peculiar, but cannot resist their intoxicating combination of wealth and privilege.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s semi-autobiographical novel This Side of Paradise (1920) also looks at prestige and tracks the unstable relationship between Amory Blaine and the young debutante Rosalind Connage at Princeton University. The book explores the quest for status, prosperity and the eventual loss of both. The success of the novel convinced Fitzgerald’s love interest Zelda to marry him and its publication is seen as the beginning of their life of celebrity and revelry in the Roaring Twenties.

Elsewhere, the life changes that accompany meeting a new group of people and moving to a new city are best illustrated by James Joyce’s depiction of a Dublin student’s transformation in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). The protagonist, Stephen, decides to pursue the life of an artist when he becomes disillusioned with the institutions of education, family and religion. Joyce is never an easy read, but your dedication will be richly rewarded by this supremely crafted and complex novel.

On partying

The bohemian lifestyle* is a central component of the campus novel. Invariably, a particular section of students will use the university experience to temporarily live out their dreams of a bohemian, carefree life of excess. They may be a fan of the punk aesthetic, or simply not enjoy early mornings. Anyway, when amorality and excess are needed, who better to look to than Bret Easton Ellis?

Ellis’s novel, The Rules of Attraction (1987), focuses on a group of licentious and boisterous college students in Camden College, New Hampshire. Their outward pretence of exuberance masks violence, depression and self-loathing and the novel becomes increasingly bleak. Ellis’s depiction of Classics students dressed “'like undertakers” is later echoed in Tartt’s The Secret History.

(*literary slang for heavy drinking and all-night parties)

On academia

Although actual studying is thin on the ground in the campus novel (after all, nothing interesting ever came from describing someone highlighting lecture notes in the library), we do get an insight into the – frankly dreary – life of the university professor.

J. M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning novel Disgrace (1999) parallels the personal and the political, as University of Cape Town teacher David Lurie is forced to deal with the fallout from his affair with a student, while the negative consequences of South Africa’s apartheid regime become apparent. Pnin (1957), by Vladimir Nabokov, comically depicts the mishaps of Russian-born professor Timofey Pnin at a college in the US. Nabokov’s novel is best described as a tragicomedy; pain and humiliation are hidden beneath Pnin’s continual bumbling. Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005), meanwhile, sees two professors, Howard and Monty, compete for professional status amid a wider clash of values, culture and ideas of race.

Every so often a book disappears in a veil of anonymity, only to suddenly reappear to renewed critical and commercial success. One such book is Stoner (1965), by John Williams. Initially published to a lacklustre reception, Williams’ novel has subsequently been dubbed “the greatest American novel you've never heard of" by The New Yorker. Williams manages to find poignant intricacy in the anonymous and undistinguished life of an English professor. The conclusion: professors might appear wary and aloof, but they are just as complicated as you are.

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