5 campus novels to read this September
The leaves are turning red and orange, the temperature is dropping and the new academic term is fast approaching. This is your sign to sharpen your pencils, find your laptop charger and crack open one of the following campus novels to get you in the mood for long nights at the library and 9am lectures.
THE SECRET HISTORY, DONNA TARTT (1992)
It would be difficult to discuss campus novels without mentioning Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. Credited with ushering in the ‘dark academia’ genre, Tartt’s debut has become a modern classic and an ur-text for contemporary university novels. Richard Papen, narrating years after the story’s events, is a California-native who attended an elite liberal arts college in Vermont during his youth. He is initially not admitted to eccentric Classics professor Julian Morris’s class, but after becoming part of the clique that makes up its attendees he learns how to get on Morris’s good side. As he becomes further ingrained into the group member’s daily lives (and is allowed into Morris’s class), he notices strange goings-on and intricate tensions between them that manifest in a double murder. The snowy, Gothic surroundings of the novel have arguably shaped how we envision the American college experience, at least in its Northern states, and have created a cult following still going strong after nearly 35 years.
THE ADJUNCT, MARIA ADELMANN (2026)
Perhaps one of the most realistic novels of the campus novel genre in its determination to un-romanticise the experience of working in a university, Maria Adelmann’s The Adjunct is a reflection on the gig economy that has seeped into the academic sector. Sam takes on an adjunct professor role at a liberal arts college close to where she lives in Baltimore, where she quickly becomes overworked and underpaid, while also being anxious about the precarious nature of short-term contracts. Within her already existing whirlwind of emotions and preoccupations, she comes back into contact with her former PhD supervisor, who she soon learns has a second novel forthcoming. The rumours indicate that its subject is the nature of her own relationship with him, and she attempts to take ownership of both the story and the situation, while constantly on the backfoot because of her class and economic position. The Adjunct is a fresh take on university life and culture that highlights contemporary issues pertaining to the MeToo movement and academic employment.
LOTE, SHOLA VON REINHOLD (2020)
Lote’s protagonist Mathilda Adaramola is a researcher based in London with an especial interest in figures that she calls “Transfixions”: Black, queer, trans and/or femme people from history who have largely been forgotten, particularly those who were part of the “Bright Young Things” movement of the 1920s. When looking through an uncatalogued collection of photographs in the National Portrait Gallery, she comes across the (fictional) Black, Scottish poet Hermia Druitt and becomes fixated on researching her. Broke, she searches the internet for grants that can facilitate further research, and she comes across a mysterious residency based in Dun, a small European town where Druitt was known to live. Partaking in the residency, she becomes embroiled in academic and creative tensions that hark back to Tartt’s The Secret History, while being situated in their own distinct text. Lote is a novel about the joys and frustrations of archival research, the freeing spirit of the Decadent movement, the power of reinvention and a reflection on those who are forgotten by academic and public research, and why.
VLADIMIR, JULIA MAY JONAS (2022)
“When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could also tell that they loved me.” The opening line of Jonas’ debut Vladimir is as provocative as the remainder of the novel, which charts an unnamed English Literature professor’s struggles as she deals with accusations of inappropriate behaviour by students levelled against her husband (also a professor) and her growing obsessions with a younger member of staff, the enigmatic Vladimir. She finds that her private life, consisting of an agreement with her partner that they have a discreet open relationship, has seeped into public discussion thanks to his alleged conduct in their shared workplace. Navigating the moral issues implicit in student-teacher relationships as well as age-gap discourse, Vladimir revels in the discomfort of these topics, leaving the reader to form their own opinions on what is laid out. (A tip would be to read this alongside Amia Srinivasan’s essay collection The Right To Sex, which explores similar topics). Now a Netflix series starring Rachel Weisz and Leo Woodall, this is an alluring campus novel – and an impressive debut from Jonas.
THE IDIOT, ELIF BATUMAN (2017)
Set in Harvard in the 1990s, The Idiot is a semi-autobiographical novel by Turkish-American writer Elif Batuman that is slowly achieving a similar cult status as Tartt’s The Secret History. Selin is a student of linguistics with a special interest in the Russian language who meets a Hungarian student, Ivan, in one of her classes. She and Ivan begin emailing and spending a small amount of time together that does not reflect the intensity of their correspondence – at least not in Selin’s view. During the summer, she travels to Paris and then to Hungary, where she has accepted a short-time teaching position, partly to be closer to Ivan. Batuman explores the strange, contradictory and sometimes overwhelming emotions of being young and experiencing a slew of new environments, linking Selin’s experiences with those in Russian literature – the title is a reference to Dostoevsky’s novel of the same name. In 2022 Batuman followed The Idiot with its sequel Either/Or, continuing Selin’s university life with the same micro-observations and themes as the first novel.
