It’s easy to forget that a school campus is an artificial setting, designed so that students can learn and hang out together, and so that professors can teach and not show up at their office hours and then somehow blame it on you. The campus, therefore, is the perfect place to set a novel, because it’s a made-up setting that could also exist in real life, and because campuses are often filled with rich characters who come from wildly different backgrounds and each have their own set of experiences. Here are some of the best examples of campus novels.
“Lucky Jim” by Kingsley Amis — Jim Dixon doesn’t want to be a lecturer in medieval studies, but he kind of fell into it. He’d rather be in the real world, chasing girls and living a glorious metropolitan life in London. Uneasy with the pseudo-intellectual posturing of other professors in his department, Dixon struggles to keep a good relationship with everyone else. Despite his academic incompetence, he tries to publish scholarly work before his job’s probationary period ends. Amis based the book’s unnamed campus on Oxford, where he went, and skewers the departmental pettiness and cloistered culture he observed. One professor is even based on J.R.R. Tolkien, who was Amis’ least-favorite professor at Oxford.
“The Secret History” by Donna Tartt — As with Hogwarts, the campus of “The Goldfinch” author’s first novel is a place for students to reinvent themselves and avoid eccentric professors in hallways. Richard Papen, from a small town in California, heads to Hampden College, a small Vermont school based on Bennington College, where Tartt went. Papen gets into an elite group of classics majors who, as we’re told at the beginning of the book, will kill one of their group. The novel tracks how that happens, as well as what happens to the group after the murder. Amidst the mystery at the novel’s center, some of the best scenes are just of the characters hanging out, drinking, making mistakes and generally just not spending much time in class. It’s a great novel to lose yourself in.
“Pnin” by Vladimir Nabokov — Nabokov himself was a professor at Wellesley and Cornell, where he was known to ask students to watch movies for him and find out if they’re good enough to watch with his wife. His novel is about an absentminded Russian professor named “Vladimir Vladimirovich N—” at “Waindell” College. The story turns out to be both a comedy of manners, set in the weird world of college rather than Victorian tea rooms, as well as a culture-clash comedy about the weird differences between America and Russia.
“Stoner” by John Williams — On lists of “the best book you’ve never heard of,” “Stoner” often ranks near the top. Every few years, it dips into obscurity only to be rescued by a reissue that brings critical acclaim. It’s about William Stoner, who, sent to school to study agriculture, instead gets drawn into studying English after he falls in love with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, and then later becomes an English professor. As a professor, he’s completely undistinguished, producing no extraordinary scholarship and struggling through a difficult marriage. It’s one of the most compelling things you’ll ever read. Williams is a master at getting into the inner psychology of his characters and making them fascinating.
“This Side of Paradise” by F. Scott Fitzgerald — Fitzgerald’s first novel was so successful that, after publishing it, he was able to convince Zelda Sayre to take him back, and then marry him. It’s about a student who dabbles with literature and women at Princeton before serving in World War I, solidifying his weariness about the world. Unlike Zelda Fitzgerald, Princeton University’s president wasn’t a fan of the novel, saying its characters spend “their lives wholly in a spirit of calculation and snobbishness.”
“The Magicians” by Lev Grossman — Right after leaving an interview he was supposed to have for Princeton, Quentin Coldwater is whisked away to interview for Brakebills, a gleeful riff on Hogwarts and sort of American wizarding college. Learning how to perform magic, it turns out, is actually pretty boring, involving a lot of dense theory and long hours of practice. In everything else, Quentin and his friends learn that, with magic, they’re pretty much playing the world on “easy” mode, so they spend their time indulging in life’s more hedonistic pleasures, eventually becoming drug addicts. Things get weird when they discover a portal to another, Narnia-like world, eventually sending them on a path to find fulfillment.
The “Harry Potter” series by J.K. Rowling — After Harry, Ron and Hermione, the fourth character of the Harry Potter novels is Hogwarts itself. Hogwarts is everyone’s form, where the characters can leave their parents and learn to grow up on their own, fawn over professors who’ve won Witch Weekly’s Most Charming Smile Award five times, and run into the occasional unicorn. As in college, some of the most important learning happens outside of the classroom.