The campus novel has it all: dreams, failures, friendships, first love, awkward sex, weird power dynamics, social politics, angst. The rare opportunity for total self-reinvention that university brings, allowing protagonists to experiment messily as they come of age. The nostalgic rendering of an otherworldly place (wood-panelled libraries, manicured lawns). The portal to a youth culture and aesthetic of another time.
According to BookTok and Bookstagram though, the campus novel canon is slim: Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Elif Batuman’s The Idiot are regularly hailed as the texts. And while a lot of that hype is deserved, some masterful academia-themed novels are being overlooked in the process. We’ve handpicked a reading list of underdog campus novels for you here, spanning new releases and overlooked classics.
The Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood
In an Ottessa Moshfegh-esque opening to the novel, protagonist Dorothy takes a shit in the library toilet while ignoring a call from her therapist, contemplating her miscarriage, scrolling her phone and reflecting on a depressing sexual encounter. Inhabiting the sardonic inner world of a disillusioned, overthinking adjunct professor facing feeble job prospects, The Life of the Mind is a book about dreams, endings, and the cost of neuroticism.
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Fariña
A countercultural masterpiece, Been Down So Long… follows a modern Odysseus, Gnossos Pappadopoulis, as he returns from enlightening travels, “mind awash in schemes” to a thinly-veiled Cornell University in the late-50s. Set between the Beatnik and hippie movements, the novel is a campus bildungsroman with revolutionary verve.
The Laughter by Sonora Jha
By turns comic and chilling, The Laughter offers a character portrait of a grimly prejudiced English professor obsessed with a younger Pakistani Muslim colleague. (Serious Humbert Humbert vibes going on here.) Its deft exploration of racial politics on campus and her satirical digs at academia’s stuffy absurdity point toward a painful need for change.
Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm
The classic campus novel you’ve (probably) never heard of. Title character Zuleika (pronounced “Zu-leek-a”, according to Beerbohm), a sleight-of-hand magician, is the Edwardian era version of a Love Island bombshell. Upon her arrival at an all-male college at Oxford University, every undergraduate’s head turns; the entire student body falls in love with her “incorrigible beauty”. But the ending is significantly darker than a fire pit dumping.
Groundskeeping by Lee Cole
Groundskeeping brims with the deliciously nostalgic observations that you sign up for in a campus novel: the buildings along the grassy quad are “Georgian-style structures of red brick”; the foreign film posters and Wurlitzer jukebox in a grad student’s room are reflective of “someone with an overdeveloped sense of irony and curation, who also happened to be broke”. Come for the shrewd prose, stay for the fraught love story between Owen, a campus groundskeeper, and Alma, a writer-in-residence.
Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou
Elaine Hsieh Chou’s hilariously tongue-in-cheek Disorientation follows Ingrid, a PhD student struggling to write her thesis on the fictional Xiao-Wen Chou, considered “the greatest Chinese-American poet”. In her procrastination, she pens erotica and develops an antacid addiction. When Ingrid uncovers that Chou is actually a white man called John Smith, protests break out on campus. Smith’s character is based on a real-life white poet, Michael Derrick Hudson, who admitted to submitting previously-rejected work to literary journals under the name Yi-Fen Chou.
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
Though Lolita is Nabokov’s most-known work, it was Pnin that launched his career. He wrote the latter while working on the former, calling Pnin “a brief sunny escape from [Lolita’s] intolerable spell”. The novel brims with silliness, chronicling the misadventures of professor Timofey Pnin, who in the opening scene is travelling to a women’s club to give a lecture but boards the wrong train, loses his bag and has a near-heart attack. Chaos.
My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Alpert Florin
“A campus is a cauldron, a swirling pot of people learning about themselves”, Daisy Alpert Florin wrote in a recent blog on the art of the university novel. Her sparkling new release, My Last Innocent Year, follows Isabel Rosen, who studies English at a fictional New England college, Wilder, and contributes to a feminist university journal, bitch slap. Set against the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal of the late 90s, the novel documents the aftermath of a non-consensual sexual encounter that rocks Isabel’s final year.
Stoner by John Williams
Stoner enjoyed a renaissance in the mid-2000s — emerging from obscurity four decades after its original publication — yet still lacks the cult following it desperately deserves. The novel’s charm lies in the profound ordinariness of the eponymous William Stoner’s career and love life. If you’re into existentialism, this is the book for you: it’s drawn comparisons with Albert Camus and Edward Hopper paintings.
Trust Exercise and My Education by Susan Choi
In Trust Exercise, predatory relationships unfurl between older men and young female students at a suburban drama school in a decidedly #MeToo novel. Yet, in My Education, Susan Choi subverts the classic heterosexual student-professor relationship trope: grad student Regina falls in love with a male professor’s wife, Martha.
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
Set in the fictional university town of Wellington, the 2005 masterpiece On Beauty is a novel of clashes: of cultures, of families, of conservative and liberal academic values. Yet, Zadie wields these conflicts into a bright tapestry, complete with her characteristically electric descriptions: in Wellington’s yard, there’s “the white church and the grey library, antagonizing each other on opposite sides of the square”; the Besley family residence is a “tall, garnet-coloured building […] the windows retain their mottled green glass, spreading a dreamy pasture on the floorboards whenever strong light passes through them.”
Heart Sutra by Yan Lianke
The satirist and self-described “mythorealist” Yan Lianke set his latest work Heart Sutra — which can’t be published in his native China — at the government-sponsored religious centre of a Beijing university. Disciples of Daoism, Buddhism, Catholicism, Protestantism and Islam are welcomed to a year-long training programme featuring tug-of-war competitions between faiths. A love story unfolds between two students, who together begin to question organised religion as corruption infiltrates the centre.
Engleby by Sebastian Faulks
Mike Engleby, the sociopathic protagonist of Engleby who reads English and Natural Sciences at an “ancient university” (Cambridge) and is infatuated with a fellow student, makes for a deeply unreliable narrator. He eventually becomes a journalist, and like Elaine Hsieh Chou’s John Smith, adopts a new, woman’s name, Michèle Watt, because the magazine he wrote for wanted to publish women writers. This disorienting, disturbing novel is Dark Academia at its finest.