The Lecturer's Tale.(Review)

The Lecturer's Tale, by James Hynes; Picador, 2001, $50.

READERS OFFENDED by the pretensions of academic claptrap will like this one. The Lecturer s Tale by James Hynes, a "tale of terror and tenure" manages to be both politically incorrect, capital P, capital I, and hugely funny at the same time.

In his hero Nelson Humboldt at Midwest University, Hynes sketched an unforgettable pen portrait of a man near the bottom of the academic food chain, "[Humboldt] was about to become a former visiting adjunct lecturer, on his way to failed academic."

Humboldt's colleagues are lesbians Gillian "who had dispensed with her patriarchal surname, in the spirit of such foremothers as Roseanne, Cher and Madonna" and Victoria Victorinox (Swiss Army knife, get it?) whose walls are adorned with an etching of the Hungarian Countess Bathory in her bath; Bathory, you may recall, was a real-life female Dracula who murdered children to bathe in their blood. Gillian is applying Victoria's theory of clitoral hegemony to her dissertation on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Others include Penelope O, holder of the Hugh M. Hefner Chair in Sexual Studies and author of a well-respected academic text on "fantasies of sex with famous canonical authors" and Vita DeLeonne, who specialises in gender issues (including the "lesbian phallus" of Oscar Wilde--who would have been most surprised), but who has never read The Importance of Being Earnest since "primary texts are problematic, they have no theoretical rigour, they cannot be contained". Midwest's premier theorist is the mercurial Marko Kraljevic, a self-professed "intellectual samurai, the Toshiro Mifune of Cultural Studies" while postcolonialist African-American Stephen Michael Stephens constantly nods off, to jolt awake murmuring, "Yes, effendi" from his Lawrence of Arabia texts.

Alpha male Department Chair Anthony Pescecane drives a Jag, earns a six-figure salary and affirms that literature must be judged by its "street cred"; Pescecane's relentless rival is oleaginous Morton Weissmann, proponent of the Western canon and seducer of impressionable undergrads:

 
   "The kids have something to teach us," he announced with seignieurial 
   graciousness at one smoky party, his large hand comfortably around the 
   waist of a braless twenty-year-old with silky blonde hair hanging to the 
   middle of her back. He wasn't just pleasuring himself, he declared, if 
   anyone objected; he was ...