Let’s see if I have this straight. Mary McCarthy spent a year teaching creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College in the late 1940s. In 1952, she published The Groves of Academe, which some credit as being the first faculty novel. In the years since, the shelf devoted to that inbred genre stretches into the next valley. Ms. McCarthy has a lot to answer for.
It happens that the poet Randall Jarrell taught at Sarah Lawrence that same year. Two years after McCarthy’s book appeared, Jarrell published this satire about a novelist of repute who spends a year teaching at a progressive women’s college and uses that year to gather material for a savage novel.
I haven’t read Groves, but I’m sure Jarrell’s book is funnier. I haven’t guffawed while reading so often since the last Mark Twain I read. I don’t know if McCarthy ever spoke to Jarrell again. In addition to being a good writer, she seems to have been a top-notch feuder.
Jarrell’s telling jabs at the foibles of institutions of higher learning balance between merciless and affectionate. Many are the observations of his own alter ego, the narrator, but the most telling blows are landed by the novelist, Gertrude. In singing the praises of Benton College to the Committee on Aims, she declaims: “Beautiful spot! So young, so lovely! So unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!” (p. 211).
In one of my favorite scenes, Gertrude dissects a visiting lecturer at the reception in the home of the college’s president. The lecturer, Daudier (pronounced Dod-yer), seems to be an amalgam of Clifton Fadiman and Mortimer Adler. This scene comes near the end of the book, just as I was beginning to wonder whether Jarrell’s love of paradox didn’t border on the perverse (“you had to hear it not to believe it” - p. 25). The book is witty and insightful from beginning to end.
( )

This book had flashes of clever writing, but much more that was obscure and pointless. Perhaps prose by a poet tends toward taking risks of metaphor and expression that work in the more spare poetic medium, but fail in a prose narrative. There was an underlying snarky tone, in which nearly every character is faulted as pathetic, or mindlessly selfish and provincial, that made it further unsatisfying. ( )

The funniest, wittiest, meanest satire this side of Mary McCarthy. And it's about Mary McCarthy. ( )

I wish he'd written more than one novel. Jarrall is of course most famous for 'The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,' which was, along with 'The Hollow Men,' one of the poems responsible for getting me into literature 25 years ago, when I was 12 or 13.

Too busy to say much right now: this is a superior, perhaps one of the best, of the academic fiction I've read, although I have to admit that I don't read much of it: too self-indulgent. It's as good as Pnin, better in many ways than Possession, and leaves crap like David Lodge or Francine Prose in the crapdust. And, unlike Amis's Lucky Jim, Jarrall's satire often discovers things to like in academia. With that in mind, this excerpt from the summary is pretty hamfisted: "Pictures from an Institution is a superb series of poisonous portraits, set pieces, and endlessly quotable put-downs. One reads it less for plot than sharp satire, of which Jarrell is the master." No, actually, it's a lot more than that, and that's obvious, again, if you compare it to Lucky Jim: but that would require, oh, knowing anything about the genre before writing the blurb. Now, as for the purportedly savage caricature of Mary McCarthy: sort of. But one has to observe just how brilliant the Gertrude character is: she's mean, but there's no character more witty or feared in the novel, and it's never said that Gertrude's a bad writer. If someone savagely portrayed me this way, I'd have his babies.

So, if you don't like an academic novel that's light on plot, one whose prose is a set of poetic maxims strung together, then read Jane Smiley's Moo. Otherwise, read this. Now. ( )

This may be the most consistently witty book ever written. There may be a sentence that couldn't be extracted and framed, but you would have to hunt for it.

The usual disclaimer about resemblances to actual people and places is attached, but is even less credible than usual. A little online research reveals that the college is Sarah Lawrence, and the villain -- or so it is asserted -- is the novelist Mary McCarthy.