What Happened? College Humor Gone Bad

Who doesn’t enjoy a good satire of higher education? Colleges are easy to send up – or at least they used to be. When I remember Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim or Jane Smiley’s Moo, I think laughter, smiles and knowing glances. Recently reading Richard Russo’s novel Straight Man, though, has me in a different state of mind. It might be just that book, which I found to be decidedly unfunny. Or it might be something different. I may have changed or perhaps something broader has shifted in our thinking about college satire.

Russo is a successful author whose fiction has been well-received for decades. He writes for the television and movies, too, and has even won a Pulitzer. Russo’s novel Nobody’s Fool was made into an excellent movie with Paul Newman. It’s a favorite of mine. In 1997, Russo’s higher education comedy Straight Man was published. The reviews were consistently positive. Kirkus called it “gloriously funny” and the New York Times, New Yorker, and USA Today all liked it.

The book is first-person account from an English faculty member and acting department chair who is teaching at second or third tier college in Pennsylvania. Or more precisely, our narrator and faculty member is paid to teach but spends a ton of time on other issues while wrestling with a mid-life crisis. The protagonist, hero and anti-hero, William Henry Devereaux Jr., experiences a host of crises and dramas, flirtations and escapades, over a short period of time. Included in the escapades are campus politics (petty and serious), sex and flirting, sexual harassment, budget problems, student complaints, health complaints, family issues, drinking and drinking, and a whole lot more. Devereaux is a contrarian, a curmudgeon, a friend to some and also a really nasty colleague. He is difficult to everyone. We may be supposed to believe that he has a heart of gold, but chronicling his behavior makes it a difficulty claim to believe.

Entitled mediocrity best describes the environment in and around the fictional “West Central Pennsylvania University” of Straight Man. Mocking the characters’ pretensions would easier if they all were not so sad, so frustrated, and so deeply unhappy. The relatively disinterested university employer serves mostly as a foil. One could also argue that it is a facilitator and enabler to poor behavior across the board. Imagine over the top inappropriate actions, the kind that might show up on daytime reality television (Jerry Springer?), with faculty and staff as the stars.

Bracketing the strengths and weakness of this one particular book, I am starting to believe that the easy satirical pickings of higher education are now a thing of the past. We may have pretentious institutions and players, to be sure, but they are fewer and farther between. Decades of reduced funding, attacks from the left, right, above and below, and pressures to do more with less have rendered much of academia as toothless. Higher education may be generating a great deal of attention, but it is not setting the agenda or framing the conversation. As a consequence, it offers a fewer targets, and smaller ones at that, for lampooning.

Following a similar path, it is difficult today to make fun of the struggling student, burdened by debt, who hopes to do well and is not academically strong. Perhaps we can mock the entitled and pretentious. However, there are few of those students at smaller public universities. There is simply less humor to be squeezed out of these scenarios.

One could, I imagine, go super dark to make the situation funny. There have been funny novels that take place in all manner of awful situations, from wartime to future dystopias. They are different, though, than Straight Man. The book plays it straight. It’s tragic, not comedic. The book jacket extols Russo’s “high-wire walk between hilarity and heartbreak.” I think that he fell off on the side of unhappiness.

David Potash

January 24, 2019 Reviews

Evangelicals and American History

Frances Fitzgerald’s The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America is an outstanding work of history. A hefty 700 pages, the book is comprehensive without losing voice or focus. It’s a pleasure to read. It’s also the kind of work that should be read by many. Understanding the evangelical tradition in the United States is essential to deeper comprehension of American culture and politics.

Fitzgerald is a Pulitzer prize winning author and journalist. Her aim here is to give a comprehensive review of the evangelical movement from the First Great Awakening in colonial America through the present. The book’s focus, though, is on more recent events, from the 1970s to the present. It is a work of synthesis and integration. Fitzgerald has read the scholarship extensively. The Evangelicals has a learned feel to it but it is not pedantic.

Evangelicals are Protestants who believe that the Bible is the ultimate religious authority. They come from many traditions. Evangelicalism is an expansive term and it has changed over the years. Common to all evangelicals is enthusiastic preaching of the gospels. The origin of the term comes from Greek for “good news.”

The books is not just about religion. It explains the thread of the evangelical movement, and its leadership, with great awareness of the political environment. Fitzgerald’s focus give us a much better comprehension of what is, and who is, the Christian right. Perhaps the book’s greatest argument and takeaway is that regardless of the waxing and waning of the Christian right in the past fifty years, the movement’s underlying values – the spirit that animates it – were forged in the nineteenth century. Historical knowledge is essential.

The book, in fact, made me want to go back to the classroom to teach history. The evangelical tradition in American has been important for centuries. I have taught survey courses and reading The Evangelicals has highlighted to me just how important. The book offers and extremely helpful lens for understanding.

David Potash

January 23, 2019 Reviews

Pat Barker is a Genius

No ifs, ands or buts about it – Pat Barker is one of the best novelists around. A bit more than a decade ago I read her Regeneration trilogy, three novels taking place in World War I. It was gripping, amazing, and memorable. They gave me goosebumps. The books were well-read, well-reviewed, and received multiple awards. The last novel in the three, The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize.

I don’t really know why, but I went for years without reading anything else by her. Barker kept writing, gathering up awards and putting out novels. When I came across a recent review praising yet another novel by her, I decided that it was high time to reacquaint myself with Barker. After a few more reads, my estimation of her has increased.

Barker wrote Double Vision in 2003. It’s a tightly written and yet wandering story with a hole at its middle: a character who was killed in the Middle East. His grieving wife and friend reconnect. No gimmicks in the plot. Instead, events unwind methodically as characters work to make sense of loss, life and meaning. There’s crime, passion, and a gothic feel to it – but without undue ornamentation.

In 2015 she published Noonday, the third novel in a trilogy that also stands on its own. It’s very good – no surprises there – and it deals in a very mature way with trauma, memory, and how people navigate through “history.” Again, at the center of the novel are few well developed characters who interact with each other, trying to figure out relationships, commitment and and meaning. Set during the WWII Blitz, violence defines the environment.

Both novels are sure of themselves and where they are going. Reading them provoked me into thinking through why Barker is so good, why her writing is so powerful. One answer rests on her intelligence. Her observations, her plotting, her language – it’s impossible to read Barker and not be aware that someone incredibly smart and talented has put it together. Even with her relatively straightforward language, I am aware of great wisdom, coupled with curiosity, moving the story along.

Barker shuns the unnecessary . Sentences and paragraphs, ideas and story, are clear and unencumbered. Her words are precise. She does not dumb things down, either, when parsing. It was good to reach for a dictionary when I came across “lordotic.” It’s the curve above your butt and in the paragraph, it fit perfectly.

Themes in Barker’s books are often unsettling. She writes about violence, trauma, and how people manage through it. She is generous with her characters while unsparing in her insights. I feel as though I have learned when I read her – though I never get the sense that she is didactic. There is little frivolity in her novels.

Bottom line – Barker’s writing is mature. It is literature, not fiction, from a grown up for grown ups. And when I’m ready for that, and not distraction, it makes for a very welcome read.

Thank you, Pat Barker, and please keep the prose coming.

David Potash

January 18, 2019 Things someone who grew up in NJ might write

Completely Rethinking Policing

Alex S. Vitale is a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His work is policy-based and in the public sphere. His latest book, The End of Policing, is a comprehensive rethink of policing and police as part of the larger criminal justice system and society itself. The aim here is not tweaks or adjustments. Vitale instead assembles just about every argument he can lay his hands to in order to present as dramatic a book, and theme, as possible. He identifies the growth and changes in the role of policing as the key justice issue facing our country. Vitale asserts that the police’s primary role today is not about fighting crime – it is about controlling poor people and those that might disrupt society. It’s a no-holds barred book that calls for a complete re-imagining of how we keep ourselves safe and secure. The result is fascinating and provocative – without necessarily being accurate or persuasive.

Opening the book, Vitale provides a brief historical overview of how police forces emerged in history. Those early efforts, which were often about maintaining political power through enforcing racism, classism and other forms of control, remain embedded in police forces today, he argues. Policing can actually worsen the problems it is supposedly is supposed to solve, he claims. The “wars” we have waged in recent years – on homelessness, on gangs, on drugs and on terror – have been distractions and means to increase funding and support for a neoliberal police state. In other words, we have started to label every social problem as an issue best addressed through more policing. Vitale buttresses his arguments with data and illustrations of the militarization and funding of modern policing.

Vitale claims that regardless of whatever reforms police might make, from use of data to community policing, the underlying hostility between the policed public and the police will remain. In addition to being ineffective, Vitale also argues that the expansive use of the police for social control is very expensive.

What we should be doing, Vitale states, is really thinking through what, exactly, we want the police to do. He also want society to engage in a major re-think about social problems, like poverty, hunger and homelessness, using different lenses of policy and expectations. If this takes place, he argues, then there will be a different way for society to think about crime, crime prevention and justice.

He calls for legalizing sex work, drugs, and keeping police out of the schools. Vitale believes that much more can be done with restorative justice and community involvement in public safety. Vitale seeks more funding for  mental health professionals and mental health systems, as well as for troubled adolescents and the jobless. He wants, in sum, an across the board redo of how government supports and promotes social welfare.

Vitale’s controversial argument makes one think. The book forces hard questions about what and how policing works. It raises many questions, most of which have me wondering about expectations, change and politics. I would be interested to hear how community and political leaders would respond to the book and its arguments. My hunch is that it would be greeted with skepticism by some and interest by others, especially those who leading the push for more accountable democratic socialism in government. But would a redo of policing be the first move, the foot in the door, the area of change that would generate the most support? I do not believe so. For many good reasons, we need and depend upon a professional and accountable police force. They are, in many ways, doing what no one else can or will do.

We also are often reminded, too, that the threats that social scientists tell us are more real are not necessarily the threats that move policy or politics. Take gun control, for example. Many in the policy sphere argue that a curtailment of availability of weapons would increase safety. Politically, there is less willingness to move in that direction. Terrorism is another example. Concern about foreign terrorists has been a catalyst for many policy changes. The data suggests, though, that there are probably more “likely” threats.

For the near future, I believe that Vitale’s book will find a more receptive audience in academia, especially sociology classrooms, than in the neighborhoods or city halls.

David Potash

January 17, 2019 Reviews