(Another old book review uncovered during a web space shift.)

Entirely by coincidence, I seem to have read a whole lot of books set at a college or university in recent months (Perrotta's Joe College, Stephenson's The Big U and James Hynes's The Lecturer's Tale (the subject of the current review)). General comments on the whole set may follow elsewhere, but for now, I'll focus on the latest of these.

The Lecturer's Tale is a book for anyone who's had contact with a college English department without actually becoming a postmodern literary theorist. The book describes the antics of the diverse and demented faculty at the prestigious and fictitious Midewst University in Minnesota, and gleefully mocks, spoofs, trashes, drags through the mud, and jumps up and down on the battered corpse of currently fashionable literary theory.

The book has gotten favorable to glowing reviews in a number of mainstream publications, and is being marketed as mainstream fiction. IgnorE that-- in reality, it's a work of SF. It's on the dark side of fantasy, true (and definitely an R-rated book), but not so dark as to merit the "horror" label sometimes attached to it in reviews. And it's definitely fantasy.

The sad-sack protagonist of the book is Nelson Humboldt, once a promising young postdoc in the English department, but now fallen to the lowly level of lecturer and composition teacher, and, at the start of the book, about to join the ranks of the unemployed. Shortly after his firing from the department, though, he loses his right index finger in a freak accident. When the finger is reattached, he discovers that he has the power to force others to do his bidding, simply by touching them with the finger. Though he tries to use his newfound power for good, he finds himself sorely tempted, and soon begins a new rise through the ranks of the English faculty.

And what eccentric ranks they are. The department is one of the most prestigious in the nation, filled with the shining stars of literary theory, all madder than a sack full of hatters. Among the eccentric characters are the vaguely vampirish Victoria Victorinix, a professionally Irish poet who refers to himself as "The Coogan," the mousy and nearly asexual Vita Deonne (Nelson's officemate and the only member of the department still speaking to him when the book opens) whose papers on sexuality in fiction ("The Lesbian Phallus of Dorian Gray") explore every imaginable perversion despite her own sexlessness, and the wannabe mafioso department chair, Anthony Pescecane, described by the author as a cross between Elaine Showalter and Tony Soprano, whose latest work puts forth the literary theory of "Street Cred."

From the very first sentence ("Crossing the Quad on a Halloween Friday, as the clock in the library tower tolled thirteen under a windy, dramatic sky, Nelson Humboldt lost his right index finger in a freak accident.") to the very last ("'Chapter one,' said Nelson Humboldt. 'I am born.'"), the book is chock-full of lightly tossed off literary references and in-jokes. These are never really intrusive enough to distract, and the ones I was able to catch were all pretty amusing. And anything you might lose in missing the literary jokes is more than made up for by the preposterously over-the-top parodies of academic theory. Such as the key publication of Penelope O, the Hugh M. Hefner Chair in Sexuality Studies: