Canceled graduate students, killer (literally) dissertations, an agitated cadre of revolutionary university landscapers, a Gen X professor fending off antifeminist allegations: this season’s batch of back-to-school novels isn’t satisfied with simply stirring the pot of campus controversies. This fall, novelists rendering universities are letting things boil over with surrealist takes on cancel culture, sharp satires of student activism, murderous iterations of intersectional theory, and philosophical meditations on what the academy has to teach us—not just about the canon, but about nuance, compromise, and knowing each other. Scale the walls of the Ivory Tower, and you might find yourself surprised by the view.
But as this cohort of campus novelists arrives at the gates, campuses are giving less Ivory Tower and more Leaning Tower of Pisa. Artificial intelligence, dramatic funding cuts, and right-wing censorship of campus activists and liberal academics alike are driving predictions of an upcoming “enrollment cliff”—a dramatic decrease in young adults attending four-year colleges. The New Yorker’s education columnist recently wondered whether the money currently in his daughter’s college fund might be better utilized in a “stable-growth account so that later I can cash it in to buy her an apartment, an iPhone, and whatever other tools she needs to deal with a world governed by our coming A.I. robot masters?” Recently, a high-school guidance counselor in Brooklyn told me that multiple students skipped their graduation ceremonies, instead camping outside Barclays Center to audition for Kai Cenat’s Streamer University.
Amid the desecration of the university as an ideal, and as in-person colleges increasingly fail to prepare students for the contemporary economy, lurks the accusation that these hallowed academic spaces increasingly function as ornamental playgrounds for children of the already-rich rather than as fertile ground for class mobility. It’s no wonder that university-set novels have, in recent years, tended toward the “Dark Academia” micro-genre, where harrowingly pessimistic portrayals reign.
Even so, the campus novel harbors remarkable staying power—possibly more than our country’s actual campuses. Writer Rob Franklin, at work on a campus novel himself, sees the campus setting as a metaphorical, Agatha Christie-esque escape room, “uniquely equipped to illuminate the danger of pure ideas.” Author Lilian Fishman—whose novel Women & Children, out next summer, is set at Columbia—compared the university enclosure to a “dollhouse” in its capacity to showcase “absurdity and generosity” of youthful experimentation.
Perhaps this year’s crop of campus stories augur a resistance to algorithmically generated plots and bloodless accounts of murder, a return to the form as rich soil for intellectual play, courageous forays into first crushes and self-knowledge. In Imani Thompson’s debut Honey, protagonist Ysra hunts problematic men—intellectual-property-snatching professors, masculinity influencers, aspiring intellectuals with racist taste—as a literal enactment of her dissertation research, which analyzes feminism and Afro-pessimism. Malavika Kannan, another debut author, penned a COVID novel that is also a campus coming-of-age yarn set at a culty cooperative living retreat pocked by polycules. In The Radiance, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and novelist Ayad Akhtar explores a professor’s metaphysical displacement after two shocks to his system: a hit-and-run and a compulsive fascination with a cancelled colleague. Missouri Williams, author of the science-fictional fable The Doloriad, returns with The Vivisectors: an acerbic, melancholic love story set amid an opaque cancellation scandal and an environmental crisis. This summer, I sat down with Williams, Kannan, Akhtar, and Thompson to talk culture wars, college scandals, transcendence, trauma, and more.
Malavika Kannan, Unprecedented Times, August 18, Henry Holt
Why write a campus novel now?
The pandemic happened—as it did for the protagonist—right in the middle of my freshman year of college. I had existential questions like: What does it mean to grow up? What does it mean that this rite of passage got derailed? I also love campus novels because of the tools they afford a writer. The microcosm is so fun. It’s the only time, in many Americans’ lives, when you’ll be forcibly made to hang out with such diverse people: super rich or super poor, different life experiences. Whatever political problem you want to write about in larger society, it pops up on campus—that’s why campus culture wars have always been hot proxies for larger ones.
Do you have any predictions for the future of the campus novel? As universities fall off, does the form fall off?
I think people will go the other way and feel a really nostalgic, escapist desire to read about a protected space to think. So few spaces exist for that anymore. At some point in college, I made a vow that I wanted to treat those four years the way an 18th-century white man would have: as a time to ponder, smoke cigars, and bat around ideas, instead of seeing it as a pre-professional training program. I comported myself in a capitalistically useless way: I didn’t get a useful degree, I didn’t even do internships. I committed to the bit that I wanted to take these four years to think, because that is the biggest privilege on earth.
The word luck is almost totemic in this book, in a sort of Venn diagram with privilege—the terms have overlap, but aren’t synonyms.
In this country, at this moment, there’s no way to be aware of how much is wrong in the world—how lucky we are to be born on the side of where bombs are made, as opposed to where they’re dropped—and not feel extreme luck. And yet, we have the ticking countdown of climate change that gives an almost fuck it, we ball mentality to Rishi, my protagonist, and her friends as they figure out how to navigate this privileged experience of being in college. The flip side of that feeling is guilt—there’s guilt associated with the word privilege that there’s not with luck. Privilege is unearned, but so too is luck, which in some ways is a more honest word.
This novel plays with the “messy sad girl” trope, but with a lot less irony and nihilism than we usually see. Those storylines can lean so individualistic and deadpan, but this book’s downward spiral is wrenchingly poignant, and it occurs in community.
We need more friend groups in literature. I am really tired of a navel-gazing, self-sabotaging protagonist who’s disintegrating all by herself. I wanted to create the impression of an ensemble cast on principle, because collectivity is how we get out of bad situations.
Were there any campus novels you wanted to emulate or subvert?
One book that was the direct inspiration for this book is Elif Batuman’s The Idiot. I love that book dearly, but the lack of political stakes is glaring. When I started writing Unprecedented Times, my internal logline for the book was: I wanted to write The Idiot, but she knows she’s gay off rip, and she fucks.
Missouri Williams, The Vivisectors, May 26, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Why set this story on a campus?
I’ve always been interested in universities as places where tensions are intensified because of the claustrophobia. It’s a hothouse for ideas. It felt very natural to set a book about the problem of interpretation, over-reading, and aggressive analysis in a place where interpretation, over-reading, and aggressive analysis are the bread and butter. The space provides an intensity of feeling that’s hard to conjure in a different setting.
That intensity is exacerbated by the eccentric temporality campuses create—what did the time signature of a campus novel offer you as a writer?
One of the things that marked this character for me was her extreme sense of isolation. She’s not in the university as a student anymore, but she’s never left it because disappointment there has marked the rest of her life. That campus time is part of the isolation and claustrophobia: events there gain their own momentum when you’re cut off from the rest of society. The university itself becomes this really powerful character in your life, especially in institutions with a certain prestige.
Towers are a motif here—characters trade myths about towers, the tower serves as a symbol of isolated selfhood alongside the desire for connection, the yearning for someone to scale the tower. Were the recurring towers riffing on the Tower of Babel, and the notion of the ivory tower?
I’m so glad you noticed! I wanted to have this echo of the ivory tower as a symbol of decadence, a place where one can be absorbed with these abstract, seemingly useless issues and intellectual trivia, while cut off from society. Then, the shift into Babel, confusion as signified by many languages and an expansion of concepts, because the whole idea of the novel is that the university is losing its identity. The city is opening up to other influences. Some people are up for that, some people are against that. But I wanted to deploy the tower as a symbol of learning and progress towards a difficult kind of selfhood.
Love, in this novel, is violent and merciful, a state of vulnerable, aggressive mutability. What is it about love that you were grasping at, that you couldn’t say without wielding multiple forms?
I very much wanted to have the nuclear and academic families in dialogue to overlap these senses of disappointment, of feeling let down by the institution and let down by the family, and the crossovers between them. I wanted to deal with the problem of skepticism toward other minds, the difficulty of accepting another person’s reality and extending yourself toward them. That image of extending a hand appears throughout the novel.
The narrator satirizes the state of the contemporary novel, mocking stories without proper nouns, but she unwittingly exists within one.
I have always been interested in discussions about where the novel is, what the future of the novel is, why novels are “bad now.” I wanted to write something that felt contemporary—a first-person, unnamed female narrator. I wanted to participate in this idea of the kind of contemporary novel a woman writer might write, and the kind of contemporary novel that draws a lot of censure. But I also wanted to make fun of myself. I find it frustrating, the tendency to pronounce that the novel is in crisis, that everything is bad.
Imani Thompson, Honey, May 5, Random House
Why write a campus novel now?
I first came up with the premise of a woman literally on the hunt for bad men—one who understands said hunting as a way to enact intersectional feminism. I thought, the university feels like a perfect setting. Institutions like Cambridge are spaces that symbolize privilege, the establishment, hierarchies. It has all these layers of history, and at the same time it is simply quite mental; there is a lot of fun to be had with it. We see a lot of literature and movies set at Oxbridge, but mostly from the white perspective. I was keen to show it from the Black perspective.
Cambridge has a specific three-term structure. What opportunities did that time signature offer?
At university, you live a whole life in a term. I wanted the feeling of the stress of summer exams, then the Christmas tree going up. This character has gone straight from school to university for her master’s, her PhD. I was interested in the fact that she presents as super worldly, but she’s actually never experienced the world. I wanted her to be unreliable. She has remained in this very artificial environment her entire adult life. While showing the power hierarchy of a campus from the Black perspective, I also wanted to write about someone Black thriving in that environment. She gets a lot of pleasure out of playing the system, even if at times the system plays her too. I thought it was fun to work with a character who is in an oppressed position, but is really succeeding, and is angry.
In addition to the campus novel canon, this novel also fits in the feminist revenge novel canon. Were there any exemplars in there that functioned as touchstones for you?
I took a lot of inspiration from the film Promising Young Woman. Also the 1981 essay by Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger,” about the idea of anger as a liberating emotion loaded with information and energy.
How does humor function here?
I love offbeat, dark comedies. I thought, humor is going to relax the reader, considering the [murderous] topics at play. Even in the book’s darkest moments, humor was never off limits.
Ayad Akhtar, The Radiance, September 29, Summit Books
You’ve written autofiction and family dramas—what drew you to the campus novel now?
What it means to yearn for meaning is a question that is put to us, and exercised with great freedom and enterprise in college. At least, it should be. Hopefully, our college experience sets us on a path that keeps those embers glowing as we move into the world and deal with the disappointments of adulthood.
Don’t worry, pretension is exactly what we’re looking for here at CULTURED. The protagonist realizes he’s interested in teaching when he struggles to express a thought, sparking an epiphany: “If I could have said it better, I wouldn’t have been so intrigued.” Are universities today losing respect for the desire for confusion, rather than clarity?
Not knowing is more interesting than knowing. Being anchored in an orientation towards not knowing means endless curiosity. That is invigorating, and it leads to discovery. I think sometimes, the premium on certainty makes it difficult to justify that confused, inquisitive attitude, especially professionally. As artists, I believe that’s probably the only real utility we have. Otherwise, we should go into advertising.
There is a lot of genre play here—essays, dreamscapes, biographical vignettes. Why draw on so many forms?
I have been acutely aware of the narrowing—no judgment—of the reader’s attention. I’ve also been acutely aware of how short-form narrative absorption, as in TikTok viewership, for example, creates a collapse of the three-act structure into a simple two-act structure—expectation: fulfilled or frustrated. I wanted to take an expansive narrative and fracture it into multiple, bite-sized, micro-narratives that, pastiche-like, create a larger picture.
One character has a controversial theory of desire predicated on vulnerability, a willingness to be hurt. That felt related to Winnicott’s role in this book. What are your thoughts on the recent revival of literary interest in psychoanalysis?
Winnicott talks about the split between the false self and the true self. One of the pathways to the true self is aggression, and the other is play. I think my character would suggest—and certainly so would Allan Bloom [author of The Closing of the American Mind], Plato, Socrates and others—that love is a thing that impels us to a recklessness that is both aggressive and playful in its nature, and discloses a way to the true self. Those thinkers, for better and worse, try to articulate a language of the interior we don’t have ready access to anymore. In a way, this book is a case for something like a “soul.”
What is a campus novel you find overrated? Underrated?
Depictions of campuses on TV feel—I’m not sure if they’re overrated—but definitely overdetermined. In searching for the dramatic conflict, there is a flattening that is not that interesting. Students aren’t really fascinating; I think teachers are more complicated. A great campus novel that people don’t talk about as much, but exists in the firmament, is Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, which is such a weird, complex campus novel.
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