The Back Side of Paradise

With few exceptions the American academic novel has merely demonstrated the monotony of the rediscovery by the young of some of the more elementary aspects of life. Only recently have the novelists discovered that the adults who clutter up the campus may be bigger game than even the most sensitive undergraduates.

The effort was overdue. The institutionalized processing that leads to the Bachelor’s Degree is a permanently expanding and expensive aspect of our society, that stamps a trademark on at least one member of every family in the United States. Marriages are no longer made in heaven, but on the sorority house porch. Professors commute to Washington to advise the federal bureaus their graduates run, or vanish periodically to replenish the nation’s resources in thermonuclear or bacteriological weapons. The barracoons of corporate recruiters engulf thousands of graduates before the caps and gowns are on their way back to the rental agency. The front office desks in the trade unions are occupied by M.B.A.’s awaiting the golden moment when the aboriginal founders succumb to cirrhosis of the liver or the circulatory stress of investment management.

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Georg Mann

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With few exceptions the American academic novel has merely demonstrated the monotony of the rediscovery by the young of some of the more elementary aspects of life. Only recently have the novelists discovered that the adults who clutter up the campus may be bigger game than even the most sensitive undergraduates.

The effort was overdue. The institutionalized processing that leads to the Bachelor’s Degree is a permanently expanding and expensive aspect of our society, that stamps a trademark on at least one member of every family in the United States. Marriages are no longer made in heaven, but on the sorority house porch. Professors commute to Washington to advise the federal bureaus their graduates run, or vanish periodically to replenish the nation’s resources in thermonuclear or bacteriological weapons. The barracoons of corporate recruiters engulf thousands of graduates before the caps and gowns are on their way back to the rental agency. The front office desks in the trade unions are occupied by M.B.A.’s awaiting the golden moment when the aboriginal founders succumb to cirrhosis of the liver or the circulatory stress of investment management.