What is it about a university setting that opens so many possibilities for fiction? Is it the fact that characters are likely to be young people embarking on the brave new world of adulthood, keen to discard the trappings of adolescence (and its many discontents)? Or is it the intriguing perspective of their teachers, doomed to the special hell of ageing in the company of perennially renewing hordes of 18-year-olds? Perhaps it’s simply that university campuses are places where ideas come to meet one another, where conversations about them seem natural, intrinsic to the building of a fictional world and a story that propels it?



The Devil and Webster is my second novel to revolve around life on a college campus. The first, Admission, follows an admissions officer at Princeton University whose life unravels when long-suppressed decisions work their way to the surface of her carefully ordered life. The bizarre approach to selecting students at elite US colleges assumes a smaller, yet crucial, role in The Devil and Webster, which concerns a mystifying student protest on the campus of fictional Webster College. Webster’s president, the feminist scholar Naomi Roth, is somewhat overconfident about her ability to handle this situation. She shouldn’t be. Student protest may be eternal, but that doesn’t mean its rules and mores are static. Naomi can’t talk to the protesters, can’t understand them and can’t make herself understood. She is also dealing with an unknowable adversary. Things do not go well.



Here are 10 of my favourite novels with campus settings. I do not claim that they are the best of their ilk, only that each has a place in my personal pantheon. (The list is also so far from comprehensive that when I set out to compile it I discovered about 10 other novels I’d never heard of … and am dying to read.)

1. The Book of Common Dread by Brent Monahan

An intriguing hybrid of a novel about an erudite 500-year-old vampire who’s set his sights on a manuscript in Princeton’s rare book collection. Horror fans will be happy to know that there is most certainly a body count. For the rest of us, cleverness and a villain we can’t help but love are compensations enough.



2. Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

A college literary festival, the indelibly named WordFest, sets the plot of Chabon’s second novel in motion. The story features a novelist with a massive writer’s block, a pregnant mistress, a visiting literary agent, a gifted (but crazy!) undergraduate and, naturally, a dead dog, all of which combine in a weekend of soul-shredding misadventures. Wonder Boys also features one of the most dead-on and hilarious passages ever written on the agony of the novelist.

3. Publish and Perish or The Lecturer’s Tale by James Hynes

Do I have to choose? Can I not just say that Hynes is a master of academic satire and leave it at that? The three linked novellas (adding up to something like a novel) of Publish and Perish (1997) include the most hysterical depiction of an academic conference ever created, and The Lecturer’s Tale (2001) combines dark gothic elements with devastating fun.

4. The Mind-Body Problem by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

The reverberations of this novel, set in Princeton’s philosophy department and written by a former graduate student in the same department, lingered long after its publication – especially at Princeton, and especially among those who clearly recognised the prototypes for some of the characters. Nevertheless, the novel possesses many charms in its own right. Poignant, witty and skewering in equal parts, it takes a clear-eyed view of that very academic animal: the genius philosopher.

5. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

Hey, I’m American, and easy as it would be to turn over half of my list to authors you already know all about (Tom Sharpe, David Lodge) can we not just agree to let this glorious novel carry the standard for the British campus novel? Amis’s tale of a hapless young academic trying to secure tenure and get the girl remains one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Don’t remember why? Two words: bed sheets.

Ian Carmichael in the 1957 film version of Lucky Jim. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

6. The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

I had two reasons to think I wasn’t going to like this novel. First: jealousy. (The book was the subject of a massive bidding war and insane pre-publication hype.) Second: baseball, around which the plot revolves. I couldn’t care less about baseball. But of course it isn’t really about that. It’s about love. And family. And ideas. And it’s beautifully written. I couldn’t help it: I succumbed. You probably will, too. (Especially if you like baseball.)

7. The War Between the Tates by Alison Lurie

Also one of the great novels about marriage. Also one of the great novels about protest. Set, like other Lurie novels, at the fictional Corinth (which bears some resemblance to Cornell, where Lurie taught), I’ve been meaning to reread it for years.

8. The Women’s Room by Marilyn French

History has not been kind to this novel, which has gone from bestseller to obscurity in the 40 years since its publication. But to me it is endlessly powerful, endlessly pertinent. The novel begins in a basement restroom at Harvard (the “Ladies’ Room” sign has been crossed out and “Women’s Room” written in its place) and moves back through an evisceration of postwar suburbia before returning its protagonist, Mira, to graduate school at Harvard in the late 60s. The cover of my 1979 paperback edition said: “This Book Changes Lives.” I was 18 in 1979, and it changed mine.

9. Old School by Tobias Wolff

Rule-bend #1: OK, this book is not set on a college campus. It’s set on a prep school campus, but I love it so much that I’m including it anyway. The student narrator, an aspiring writer in the early 1960s, is as arrogant as he is clueless, and comes under the sway of an assortment of literary “influences” (Frost, Rand, Hemingway) before giving way to outright plagiarism. Incredibly, we’re still on his side. Kind of.

10. Uncommon Women and Others by Wendy Wasserstein

Rule-bend #2: It’s not a novel, I know that, but my reverence for this glorious play has never left me. Its preservation of a particular moment in US educational history – when the Ivy League had not yet opened its doors to women and smart female undergraduates gathered in “Seven Sisters” colleges like Wasserstein’s alma mater, Mount Holyoke – is enough of an attraction in itself. But Wasserstein was never so thoughtful, so wise or so funny as she was in this loving tribute to her fellow travellers.