Reflections on the Jet Set
British and American novelists have long been writing about professors. Saul Bellow, Kingsley Amis, Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov and many others have looked at homo academicus, usually with a rather jaundiced eye. In the 1970s, Alison Lurie, who teaches English at Cornell, wrote a series of novels about professors, including one (The War Between the Tates) that was made into a rather unsuccessful motion picture. In general, academics have not come off well in these novels. They are portrayed as bumblers, spending most of their time thinking nonacademic thoughts or, heaven forbid, jumping into bed with students, colleagues, or the spouses of colleagues. Administrators, when they appear in fiction, are similarly dopey and are frequently philistines as well as bunglers. One wonders why so many novelists have so many bad things to say about the professoriate. Why are there more novels about professors than about plumbers, auto mechanics, or corporate executives (although it may well be that advertising executives and corporate officers are catching up)? At present, the best fiction about academics comes from the pen of British novelist (and professor of modern English literature at the University of Birmingham in England), David Lodge. His books are amusing, extraordinarily well written, and catch the nuances of academic life, even if they are portrayed in caricature. Lodge's newest novel, Small Worlds, deals with the stratosphere of international academic conferences. An unlikely topic for a novel, Lodge peoples his