A perennial underdog adrift in the ivory tower
Mild-mannered professor hopes to get her life on track even as the sharks circle
If the title of Suzette Mayr’s followup to her prize-grabbing novel Monoceros — Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall — suggests a pleasantly English way to pass a few hours (a tweedy lady detective, say, residing in a verdant sheep-dotted parish), the reality her fifth novel is considerably (a) more farcical, (b) bleaker, (c) off the rails and (d) closer to home.
Naively, Dr. Edith Vane became an English professor because of the “crucial, necessary, life-giving essence of books.”
A mild-mannered person in a turbulent sea of perpetually hungry — and competitive — sharks, her upcoming fall semester, she tells herself “will be perfect.”
The beleaguered recipient of toxic student evaluations, dismissive remarks from self-interested colleagues, and absolute warnings by a particularly foul bureaucrat hired to improve the university’s ranking “in terms of excellence and globalization,” Vane’s self-help promise for a bigger and better future could not be more wrong.
Then there’s her former dissertation supervisor, a barracuda who compared Edith to the Titanic. Oh, and Edith’s buxom new paramour, whose free hand with wine and pot brownies the harried professor finds increasingly difficult to resist . . . and a returning ex-girlfriend, a “psychic hangnail.”
The perennial underdog works at Crawley Hall, a literally rotting and possibly haunted, maggot-filled, hare-infested example of Brutalist architecture, at the University of Inivea.
(On a map of imaginary places, it’s a delightfully twisted version of Mayr’s Calgary, a funhouse mirror designed with Kafka and Lewis Carroll in mind).
Vane feels certain that with the publication of her debut book and a bit of exercise to tighten up her marshmallow body (“she’s a brown woman with prematurely drooping body and face parts,” she confides), she can get back on track. That’s her August promise.
By December 23, when Mayr’s story concludes, she’s no longer recognizable.
Mayr knows that readers love underdog stories, but the insider’s view of professorial and university politics (a.k.a. the “ravenous academic machine”) that stands at the novel’s foundation appears to disallow the conventional outcome.
An enjoyably funny, manic, queer, and hallucinatory farce, the novel also acts as a kind of poison pen letter about the contemporary ivory tower. Gird your loins there, Mayr suggests, and be prepared to do battle. From Up River and For One Night Only is Brett Josef Grubisic’s most recent novel.