Reading Roundup, July 2025
Jul. 27th, 2025 05:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomtomatoLove, Leda - Mark Hyatt
This novel has a fascinating backstory to its publication. Hyatt was an outsider poet in the 1960s and early 1970s, before he died by suicide. His poetry remained a niche enthusiast interest for much of the past fifty years, and luckily two of those enthusiasts decided to compile his poems into an anthology and reached out to his family and friends as part of that process. One of his friends had kept thousands of pages of his writing, including a complete novel manuscript, safe for nearly five decades. The result is this, rescued from oblivion. Hyatt’s novel is a wild, first-person stream of consciousness narrative about the titular Leda, and his experience as a poor, queer man in 1960s London.
The marketing describes the book as very much about the working-class experience, and it’s right, but what stands out most is how Leda resists attempts to bring him into middle-class sensibilities. At one of his jobs, doing steel-cutting, there is a man who clearly identifies Leda as queer and wants to write an opera with him—projecting outward some universal queer desire to do respected, mainstream art. Leda knows opera (there’s a separate conversation about Britten, then living), but refuses to take part, though he is indeed a writer. And the same repeats itself with his friends—he has many friends across class lines and loves/values them, but resists conventionality as it would mean compromising with middle-class respectability. There’s a friend he stays with, Thomas, who repeatedly entreats him to marry a woman and make a steady home with her. Both men are queer, but where Thomas appreciates and tries to achieve that ideal, Leda refuses it, refuses the comforts it would afford, and so keeps himself free of restrictions. He repeats that he is happy without a consistent home, income, occupation, or partner(s). He does not desire the comforts of conformity. It’s just very striking, and very different from the stories I more usually read in which characters strive for at least the means, if not the values, of the more well-to-do.
Stylistically, this is a very interesting book. Despite the first person narration, there are many paragraphs without sentences that start with “I.” Leda is a keen observer of the people that he’s with and recounts their actions in such depth/focus that he sort of becomes his own third-person narrator (before snapping back to a close awareness of himself). He attends a lot of parties, so it’s easy for him to fill a page with other people. He’s almost always around groups, and the amount that he’s willing to background himself to them is very notable, especially for first person, where it feels so obvious to lose his pronouns. He’s more of an observer than a participant in lots of his life.
Two quotes that I particularly loved:
The style is vibrant and will provoke a reaction. The word choices and grammar can be idiosyncratic. It makes for beautiful lines and tumbling pages of events collapsing into one another. The writing makes me thing about words in new ways. What does it mean for a person’s skin to “look like kelp?” I’m not sure, but I was arrested by the comparison.
Leda covers about two weeks of his life in the narrative, which is aggressively in medias res. Relationships exist, but are rarely explained, unless they happen to have been formed during those two weeks. Like Leda, we live in the present. Ledia is in love with a married, heterosexual man, who is like a god to him. Why? How did they meet?
Thomas, the ever-present friend and host, may be in love with Leda. He’s the man that one wishes Leda might love—stable and caring. Leda has never slept with him and turns down his proposition, which Thomas doesn’t seem to resent. Why? How did their relationship get here?
Leda has many short-term partners, including two women. He works two different jobs, living off of these temporary arrangements and money from friends. We see him beaten twice, and he attempts to kill himself once, and he eats perhaps three meals but drinks dozens of cups of black coffee, with sugar. How long has this been his norm? How old is he really? What was he doing before he was doing this? He can cut sheet metal—that was learned somewhere.
I’m struck that this book likely predates Lord Dismiss Us, another 1960s British novel about gay men. Stylistically, culturally, they are worlds apart. Both were created in that volatile decade after the Wolfenden report, and illustrate in their own ways how the experience of being gay was shifting—and how others were reacting to that. It was an unintentional but fascinating comparison to read them back to back.
I do recommend this. To me it’s incredible to recover lost art and give it public due, sort of a time capsule, and something that could not be created now. It is rougher than other novels—the author was not here to work with an editor, and the compiler wisely opted not to impose much editing. It has the quality of a manuscript, but a quick, pacey one, if the style agrees with you.
The Incandescent - Emily Tesh
Dr. Sapphire Walden teaches invocation magic (demon summoning) at Chetwood school, a private boarding school in England. We follow the course of one school year with her, in which her staid schoolmistress life is shaken by a dangerous demon incursion, the hauntings of her own past, student dramas, possession, and two separate romances. This is an eventful, teacher-focused magical boarding school novel for anyone who has ever thought, “but how did those Hogwarts instructors manage?”
I was primed for this to be bad, thanks to some FFA reviews, but I needed a bird-themed book (see: cover art) for a challenge this month, and this was my only candidate. I can safely report that it’s not at all a bad book; it’s quite good! But expectations will play heavily into how much you enjoy reading it.
Right off: I don’t think this is a very good romance, but both FFA and reader reviews tend to highlight the f/f couple. There are traditional romantic elements to it, but the endgame f/f romance is largely not on the page and neither is it the foucs—it’s not that we’re told rather than shown, it’s that there really is very little development of that relationship. So if you’re wooed in by the promise of f/f romantasy, the book is a bust!
Let’s talk instead about the appeal, which is a highly grounded treatment of magical teaching. Tesh was a schoolteacher, and that shows, but she additionally imagines the care and keeping of a magical institution. My bias is Harry Potter fandom, wherein I’ve had or read a hundred discussions of teaching schedules, pastoral care, and campus maintenance. Tesh gives us all of this and more in gory detail, with so many resonant observations about the role of a teacher and their interactions with students. I’ve seen critiques that this is dull, and it is, if it’s not your work or interest. But I got the same thrill from it as talking shop with my colleagues, plus the additional curiosity of seeing how university compares to secondary education. I very much enjoyed it. Chetwood demonstrates precisely how much labor would go into the keeping of even a small magical boarding school, and so right from the front establishes a vibrant adult community of faculty and staff and those who straddle both roles working outside of the scope of classroom teaching in order to provide the experience that students want (and that their parents pay for). This gives the objectively tiny world of a boarding school the sort of depth and vibrancy which make the setting feel genuine.
The magic system in this world is a little wobbly but overall compelling. I wish more had been done with an early discussion of how personified objects (anything we are tempted to call “you”) can become a vessel for demons to enter our world. It made me wonder about how it works in other languages and cultures, which the book doesn’t try to answer. The three disciplines of magic (instantiation, invocation, and evocation) are also fairly underexplained in ways that sometimes frustrated me. Also, ghosts? Used and abandoned early. But the social context of magic in this world was great, and I really bought the vision of demon-summoning as a fairly unremarkable addition to modern life. It was great to see the personalities of each demon, and to even get one as a major character in the second half of the book.
I loved the four main students, who were very cute and believably their ages. The secondary cast included a lot of interesting fixtures of school life, such as Reverend Ezekiel and his wife Ebele who give us a great glimpse of the pastoral system at Chetwood, or the site manager Todd who is both a fascinating look at untrained magical potential in this world and a great choice to highlight one of those key but under-remarked staff roles in the educational system.
Onto the conflicts, then. The book has one true villain, who is taken down early; a human antagonist, for the middle; and a final demon antagonist, at the end. I didn’t mind any of these, but the progression was in many ways away from a traditional fantasy story—only the first sees our protagonist doing cool magical fighting stuff. If you wanted that, stop after the first demon fight!
The human antagonist was my favorite character. His introduction is transparently ominous and no one is shocked when the posh, middle-aged English asshole (excuse me, ‘arsehole’) who loudly announces himself as bad news turns out to be, well, bad news. The protagonist sleeps with him, despite knowing better, and this seems to be the critical point at which people might drop the book. I think Dr. Walden’s choice to fuck around with this guy is frustrating. She makes a dumb choice, and that shortsightedness, or her overconfidence, might turn a reader off of her character entirely. However… for fans of awful British men, like me, this choice is a gift. I love him and I wish we got even more of him (his ending is too vague!). Again, he represents an interruption of expectations—if the f/f romance is your draw and you’re surprised by m/f sex instead, that would be jarring! But I was delighted to spend so much of the middle bit with one of my favorite character archetypes.
In sum I’d put this down as a solid modern fantasy novel that’s most interested in the question of what it means to be a teacher—as a matter of logistics, career, and identity. It has a cool approach to integrating magic into our world, it has a high-stakes plot, and it has romance elements, but those are mostly secondary to the examination of life at Chetwood and concerns of identity within that system.
Shibboleth - Thomas Peermohamed Lambert
This book came recommended by a friend who knows the author; it seems to have had a fairly small promotional cycle on its release this year, so I wouldn’t have heard about it otherwise. Shibboleth is a satirical campus novel set at modern-day Oxford, taking aim at the patterns of identity politics in student activism. The protagonist is Edward Zahir, whose grandfather was from Zanzibar but who was raised essentially white and middle-class English. The students around him are invariably wealthy, but from different backgrounds: white, English Angelica; Black, Egyptian, Muslim Youssef; white, English, gay Conrad; Black, American Liberty; white, German, Jewish Rachel. The identities of this group, plus a loose collection of secondaries, form the network of conflicts which take place in the novel.
In one sense, this is a story about young adults growing into themselves—a classic bildungsroman. Edward has a crush on Rachel, but is too shy to say anything to her and passively allows himself to be steered into a relationship with the more outgoing Angelica. He switches courses to something trendier and tries on different expressions of his identity, looking for one that both fits and helps him fit in. The friendship and the relationship dramas along the way carry the same fundamental shape as in any campus novel.
In another sense, though, this is a ruthless accounting of how the modern concept of identity fixates on ethnicity, turning questions of personal belief or family cultural practice into moral signifiers. This is, inevitably, fraught, and was ultimately something that I could not get past in order to enjoy the book.
See, the cover blurbs nearly all refer to this as a comedy and a satire. The reviews I’ve now read are the same. It is, supposedly, funny. I don’t always agree with the sense of humor in a satire, but at points I found this one to be especially cruel. For about two thirds of the novel, Edward is so passive as to provoke no offense—an offense in and of itself, but not narratively dealt with until the final third. This allows other characters, but especially Angelica and Liberty, to come across as particularly unnatural, almost perfect caricatures of the roles they represent. There is very little to like about them and no room for sympathy, and yet as deeply flawed as they are, they’re the story’s main voices for progressive values. Rachel’s ill-fated plea for nuance at the end goes a little way towards counteracting that image, but I’m still left with the overwhelming sense that the book’s thesis is that campus political activism is entirely self-serving performance by privileged students. And I work on a campus, so I know that this exists, but… yeah, this turned out to be too narrow for me to find humor in.
Then, and I was not prepared for this, the book explicitly takes on the Israel-Palestine war. And I don’t want to suggest that the writing handles this clumsily, in the manner of being slapdash and underconsidered. No, the book is delibrate and intentional and even-handed in writing the students’ reactions, but with that heightened level of satirical absurdity suffused throughout, which makes the severity of this very much still ongoing global conflict start to lose meaning. For me, it really was a case of—I don’t necessarily think that Lambert and I disagree, but that I wouldn’t want to talk with him about the subject. It was very messy. Youssef, at least, gained some depth of characterization, which was great. Angelica somewhat did, then the novel stepped back on it. Liberty remained a caricature.
And through all of this we are asked to be invested in the romance between Edward and Rachel, which does briefly exist, though it is rocky from the start. I think Lambert is not yet a very skilled romance writer, perhaps not very skilled at relationships in general, and so it is a lot to hang the main story arc off of an underwritten romance between the Jewish girl and the kinda-Muslim protagonist. There was an intentionality there, again. I understand what the book is doing. But the story needed better writing if the microcosm of that relationship was going to carry more than shallow thematic resonance.
Really, the best parts of the novel were the rare scenes of introspection from Edward. Beneath his infuriating passivity is a genuine identity crisis, only part of which relates to his background—that is there, and compelling, along with his struggle to advocate for his own interests in the face of peer pressure, his genuine passion for English literature, and his competing twin terrors of being left out and being noticed. I wished that the author put down the cultural commentary bat more often and spent more time with the character that he had created. This still would have engaged with the themes of identity politics and belonging! There was room to continue to make jokes of the setting and characters while working more deeply with what had already been set up about Edward, and thereby make the whole endeavor more compellingly rooted in his personal journey.
As it stands, I cannot recommend this book. It was also quite long, over 350 pages, so the reader needs to be very tolerant or very determined. I might just not get the context fully, not being English or knowing that educational system. Definitely the humor was not for me. I recognize parts of my experience in there, of course I do, but without the tempering elements which make them real. And I learned, in reading this, that I need more empathy for characters in the stories that I read—even, especially, the ghoulish ones. I only resented the protagonist more for having been given the privilege of depth and nuance, and having been forgiven his shortcomings, when the others so often were not.
Small World - David Lodge
Small World is the second book in the Campus Trilogy by David Lodge, a famous set of connected satirical campus novels. I’ve read and reviewed the first one previously. I wouldn’t have read this except that I found a copy in a little free library just around when I was reading Shibboleth, and I can never resist a narrative set. Despite that, let me be plain that I strongly do not recommend this book or any others in the trilogy, as the two that I’ve read have been horrifically sexist, hardly free of other bigotries, and simply not that compelling outside of academic navel-gazing interest.
Lodge writes beyond the boundaries of plot or character. He favors ensemble casts with interconnected storylines, some of which get more or less focus, all of which are resolved in ways designed to make the reader think, “how clever!” Two primary characters from the first novel return: the American professor Morris Zapp, now divorced, and the British professor Philip Swallow, marriage now on the rocks. The primary new focus is a young Irish instructor Persse McGarrigle, who is on a grail-quest (Persse = Sir Percival) to capture the heart of the beautiful, mysterious young scholar Angelica Pabst. Throughout the 340 pages of my copy, we are joined by professors and their wives and lovers in a globe-trotting satire of academic conferences.
Oh, wait. In this book, professors are allowed to be female or gay, too. But only a few of them.
If you’re familiar with the meme of male authors writing women as “breasting boobily” down the stairs, well, that’s Lodge’s writing. Never has a man been more dedicated to describing the motions of the female breast, and especially its nipple. How does so much of this fit into an ensemble cast, dozen+ setting satire of academia, you ask? Great fucking question.
I really don’t want to honor this book with a discussion of its themes or plot. What I want to talk about is its reputation, and Lodge’s reputation as one of the funniest and most brilliant satirists of academia. My copy of Small World is a 1995 printing, so let’s pretend that forgives its cover blurbs. But why, then, is Lodge’s work in so many current digital lists of the best campus novels? Why is it in one of the Shibboleth reviews, as a better example of the form? Why do I run across offhand recommendations when reading recent articles in the Chronicles of Higher Ed? Why did the third novel in the trilogy receive a nomination for the Booker prize? Why is all of this praise sung without a word of caution for the narrative treatment of the women?
Lodge has a careful eye for the types of social oddities that make a great caricature, and so I think that his books tread a fine line—they accurately and bitingly portray a (male) professor’s egoism, or bigotry, or intellectual shortcomings, or cruelty, in moments too vibrant to be entirely fictional. Clearly, there is a very real and keen observation of how professors fail their friends, family, and colleagues at the heart of this book. But the wives come in for it too, wearing sexy or frumpy pyjamas, having breasts and butts which sag from age-related weight gain, or perhaps they are given perky tits to remind us that this woman, in contrast, is sharp and young. And so although each disgusting or selfish or foolhardy man is made into a joke at some point, so too are many of the non-academic women around them, who don’t want enough sex or want too much sex or want the wrong type of sex, in ways which have only passing relevance to the critiques of academia.
So it’s overall a major distraction, and the satire is weakened to the point where I begin to question its value. And Lodge is careful and observant, and describes a culture and an era that I see value in having documented—but it’s not worth reading at this cost, and frankly, it’s not worth recommending, even for the historical value, without heavy caveats. Which I have never seen done.
This novel has a fascinating backstory to its publication. Hyatt was an outsider poet in the 1960s and early 1970s, before he died by suicide. His poetry remained a niche enthusiast interest for much of the past fifty years, and luckily two of those enthusiasts decided to compile his poems into an anthology and reached out to his family and friends as part of that process. One of his friends had kept thousands of pages of his writing, including a complete novel manuscript, safe for nearly five decades. The result is this, rescued from oblivion. Hyatt’s novel is a wild, first-person stream of consciousness narrative about the titular Leda, and his experience as a poor, queer man in 1960s London.
The marketing describes the book as very much about the working-class experience, and it’s right, but what stands out most is how Leda resists attempts to bring him into middle-class sensibilities. At one of his jobs, doing steel-cutting, there is a man who clearly identifies Leda as queer and wants to write an opera with him—projecting outward some universal queer desire to do respected, mainstream art. Leda knows opera (there’s a separate conversation about Britten, then living), but refuses to take part, though he is indeed a writer. And the same repeats itself with his friends—he has many friends across class lines and loves/values them, but resists conventionality as it would mean compromising with middle-class respectability. There’s a friend he stays with, Thomas, who repeatedly entreats him to marry a woman and make a steady home with her. Both men are queer, but where Thomas appreciates and tries to achieve that ideal, Leda refuses it, refuses the comforts it would afford, and so keeps himself free of restrictions. He repeats that he is happy without a consistent home, income, occupation, or partner(s). He does not desire the comforts of conformity. It’s just very striking, and very different from the stories I more usually read in which characters strive for at least the means, if not the values, of the more well-to-do.
Stylistically, this is a very interesting book. Despite the first person narration, there are many paragraphs without sentences that start with “I.” Leda is a keen observer of the people that he’s with and recounts their actions in such depth/focus that he sort of becomes his own third-person narrator (before snapping back to a close awareness of himself). He attends a lot of parties, so it’s easy for him to fill a page with other people. He’s almost always around groups, and the amount that he’s willing to background himself to them is very notable, especially for first person, where it feels so obvious to lose his pronouns. He’s more of an observer than a participant in lots of his life.
Two quotes that I particularly loved:
”Little by little, I die in him.”
”I open the cupboard door and see instant coffee, instant potato, and instant apple. What in this world could be more instant than apple?”
The style is vibrant and will provoke a reaction. The word choices and grammar can be idiosyncratic. It makes for beautiful lines and tumbling pages of events collapsing into one another. The writing makes me thing about words in new ways. What does it mean for a person’s skin to “look like kelp?” I’m not sure, but I was arrested by the comparison.
Leda covers about two weeks of his life in the narrative, which is aggressively in medias res. Relationships exist, but are rarely explained, unless they happen to have been formed during those two weeks. Like Leda, we live in the present. Ledia is in love with a married, heterosexual man, who is like a god to him. Why? How did they meet?
Thomas, the ever-present friend and host, may be in love with Leda. He’s the man that one wishes Leda might love—stable and caring. Leda has never slept with him and turns down his proposition, which Thomas doesn’t seem to resent. Why? How did their relationship get here?
Leda has many short-term partners, including two women. He works two different jobs, living off of these temporary arrangements and money from friends. We see him beaten twice, and he attempts to kill himself once, and he eats perhaps three meals but drinks dozens of cups of black coffee, with sugar. How long has this been his norm? How old is he really? What was he doing before he was doing this? He can cut sheet metal—that was learned somewhere.
I’m struck that this book likely predates Lord Dismiss Us, another 1960s British novel about gay men. Stylistically, culturally, they are worlds apart. Both were created in that volatile decade after the Wolfenden report, and illustrate in their own ways how the experience of being gay was shifting—and how others were reacting to that. It was an unintentional but fascinating comparison to read them back to back.
I do recommend this. To me it’s incredible to recover lost art and give it public due, sort of a time capsule, and something that could not be created now. It is rougher than other novels—the author was not here to work with an editor, and the compiler wisely opted not to impose much editing. It has the quality of a manuscript, but a quick, pacey one, if the style agrees with you.
The Incandescent - Emily Tesh
Dr. Sapphire Walden teaches invocation magic (demon summoning) at Chetwood school, a private boarding school in England. We follow the course of one school year with her, in which her staid schoolmistress life is shaken by a dangerous demon incursion, the hauntings of her own past, student dramas, possession, and two separate romances. This is an eventful, teacher-focused magical boarding school novel for anyone who has ever thought, “but how did those Hogwarts instructors manage?”
I was primed for this to be bad, thanks to some FFA reviews, but I needed a bird-themed book (see: cover art) for a challenge this month, and this was my only candidate. I can safely report that it’s not at all a bad book; it’s quite good! But expectations will play heavily into how much you enjoy reading it.
Right off: I don’t think this is a very good romance, but both FFA and reader reviews tend to highlight the f/f couple. There are traditional romantic elements to it, but the endgame f/f romance is largely not on the page and neither is it the foucs—it’s not that we’re told rather than shown, it’s that there really is very little development of that relationship. So if you’re wooed in by the promise of f/f romantasy, the book is a bust!
Let’s talk instead about the appeal, which is a highly grounded treatment of magical teaching. Tesh was a schoolteacher, and that shows, but she additionally imagines the care and keeping of a magical institution. My bias is Harry Potter fandom, wherein I’ve had or read a hundred discussions of teaching schedules, pastoral care, and campus maintenance. Tesh gives us all of this and more in gory detail, with so many resonant observations about the role of a teacher and their interactions with students. I’ve seen critiques that this is dull, and it is, if it’s not your work or interest. But I got the same thrill from it as talking shop with my colleagues, plus the additional curiosity of seeing how university compares to secondary education. I very much enjoyed it. Chetwood demonstrates precisely how much labor would go into the keeping of even a small magical boarding school, and so right from the front establishes a vibrant adult community of faculty and staff and those who straddle both roles working outside of the scope of classroom teaching in order to provide the experience that students want (and that their parents pay for). This gives the objectively tiny world of a boarding school the sort of depth and vibrancy which make the setting feel genuine.
The magic system in this world is a little wobbly but overall compelling. I wish more had been done with an early discussion of how personified objects (anything we are tempted to call “you”) can become a vessel for demons to enter our world. It made me wonder about how it works in other languages and cultures, which the book doesn’t try to answer. The three disciplines of magic (instantiation, invocation, and evocation) are also fairly underexplained in ways that sometimes frustrated me. Also, ghosts? Used and abandoned early. But the social context of magic in this world was great, and I really bought the vision of demon-summoning as a fairly unremarkable addition to modern life. It was great to see the personalities of each demon, and to even get one as a major character in the second half of the book.
I loved the four main students, who were very cute and believably their ages. The secondary cast included a lot of interesting fixtures of school life, such as Reverend Ezekiel and his wife Ebele who give us a great glimpse of the pastoral system at Chetwood, or the site manager Todd who is both a fascinating look at untrained magical potential in this world and a great choice to highlight one of those key but under-remarked staff roles in the educational system.
Onto the conflicts, then. The book has one true villain, who is taken down early; a human antagonist, for the middle; and a final demon antagonist, at the end. I didn’t mind any of these, but the progression was in many ways away from a traditional fantasy story—only the first sees our protagonist doing cool magical fighting stuff. If you wanted that, stop after the first demon fight!
The human antagonist was my favorite character. His introduction is transparently ominous and no one is shocked when the posh, middle-aged English asshole (excuse me, ‘arsehole’) who loudly announces himself as bad news turns out to be, well, bad news. The protagonist sleeps with him, despite knowing better, and this seems to be the critical point at which people might drop the book. I think Dr. Walden’s choice to fuck around with this guy is frustrating. She makes a dumb choice, and that shortsightedness, or her overconfidence, might turn a reader off of her character entirely. However… for fans of awful British men, like me, this choice is a gift. I love him and I wish we got even more of him (his ending is too vague!). Again, he represents an interruption of expectations—if the f/f romance is your draw and you’re surprised by m/f sex instead, that would be jarring! But I was delighted to spend so much of the middle bit with one of my favorite character archetypes.
In sum I’d put this down as a solid modern fantasy novel that’s most interested in the question of what it means to be a teacher—as a matter of logistics, career, and identity. It has a cool approach to integrating magic into our world, it has a high-stakes plot, and it has romance elements, but those are mostly secondary to the examination of life at Chetwood and concerns of identity within that system.
Shibboleth - Thomas Peermohamed Lambert
This book came recommended by a friend who knows the author; it seems to have had a fairly small promotional cycle on its release this year, so I wouldn’t have heard about it otherwise. Shibboleth is a satirical campus novel set at modern-day Oxford, taking aim at the patterns of identity politics in student activism. The protagonist is Edward Zahir, whose grandfather was from Zanzibar but who was raised essentially white and middle-class English. The students around him are invariably wealthy, but from different backgrounds: white, English Angelica; Black, Egyptian, Muslim Youssef; white, English, gay Conrad; Black, American Liberty; white, German, Jewish Rachel. The identities of this group, plus a loose collection of secondaries, form the network of conflicts which take place in the novel.
In one sense, this is a story about young adults growing into themselves—a classic bildungsroman. Edward has a crush on Rachel, but is too shy to say anything to her and passively allows himself to be steered into a relationship with the more outgoing Angelica. He switches courses to something trendier and tries on different expressions of his identity, looking for one that both fits and helps him fit in. The friendship and the relationship dramas along the way carry the same fundamental shape as in any campus novel.
In another sense, though, this is a ruthless accounting of how the modern concept of identity fixates on ethnicity, turning questions of personal belief or family cultural practice into moral signifiers. This is, inevitably, fraught, and was ultimately something that I could not get past in order to enjoy the book.
See, the cover blurbs nearly all refer to this as a comedy and a satire. The reviews I’ve now read are the same. It is, supposedly, funny. I don’t always agree with the sense of humor in a satire, but at points I found this one to be especially cruel. For about two thirds of the novel, Edward is so passive as to provoke no offense—an offense in and of itself, but not narratively dealt with until the final third. This allows other characters, but especially Angelica and Liberty, to come across as particularly unnatural, almost perfect caricatures of the roles they represent. There is very little to like about them and no room for sympathy, and yet as deeply flawed as they are, they’re the story’s main voices for progressive values. Rachel’s ill-fated plea for nuance at the end goes a little way towards counteracting that image, but I’m still left with the overwhelming sense that the book’s thesis is that campus political activism is entirely self-serving performance by privileged students. And I work on a campus, so I know that this exists, but… yeah, this turned out to be too narrow for me to find humor in.
Then, and I was not prepared for this, the book explicitly takes on the Israel-Palestine war. And I don’t want to suggest that the writing handles this clumsily, in the manner of being slapdash and underconsidered. No, the book is delibrate and intentional and even-handed in writing the students’ reactions, but with that heightened level of satirical absurdity suffused throughout, which makes the severity of this very much still ongoing global conflict start to lose meaning. For me, it really was a case of—I don’t necessarily think that Lambert and I disagree, but that I wouldn’t want to talk with him about the subject. It was very messy. Youssef, at least, gained some depth of characterization, which was great. Angelica somewhat did, then the novel stepped back on it. Liberty remained a caricature.
And through all of this we are asked to be invested in the romance between Edward and Rachel, which does briefly exist, though it is rocky from the start. I think Lambert is not yet a very skilled romance writer, perhaps not very skilled at relationships in general, and so it is a lot to hang the main story arc off of an underwritten romance between the Jewish girl and the kinda-Muslim protagonist. There was an intentionality there, again. I understand what the book is doing. But the story needed better writing if the microcosm of that relationship was going to carry more than shallow thematic resonance.
Really, the best parts of the novel were the rare scenes of introspection from Edward. Beneath his infuriating passivity is a genuine identity crisis, only part of which relates to his background—that is there, and compelling, along with his struggle to advocate for his own interests in the face of peer pressure, his genuine passion for English literature, and his competing twin terrors of being left out and being noticed. I wished that the author put down the cultural commentary bat more often and spent more time with the character that he had created. This still would have engaged with the themes of identity politics and belonging! There was room to continue to make jokes of the setting and characters while working more deeply with what had already been set up about Edward, and thereby make the whole endeavor more compellingly rooted in his personal journey.
As it stands, I cannot recommend this book. It was also quite long, over 350 pages, so the reader needs to be very tolerant or very determined. I might just not get the context fully, not being English or knowing that educational system. Definitely the humor was not for me. I recognize parts of my experience in there, of course I do, but without the tempering elements which make them real. And I learned, in reading this, that I need more empathy for characters in the stories that I read—even, especially, the ghoulish ones. I only resented the protagonist more for having been given the privilege of depth and nuance, and having been forgiven his shortcomings, when the others so often were not.
Small World - David Lodge
Small World is the second book in the Campus Trilogy by David Lodge, a famous set of connected satirical campus novels. I’ve read and reviewed the first one previously. I wouldn’t have read this except that I found a copy in a little free library just around when I was reading Shibboleth, and I can never resist a narrative set. Despite that, let me be plain that I strongly do not recommend this book or any others in the trilogy, as the two that I’ve read have been horrifically sexist, hardly free of other bigotries, and simply not that compelling outside of academic navel-gazing interest.
Lodge writes beyond the boundaries of plot or character. He favors ensemble casts with interconnected storylines, some of which get more or less focus, all of which are resolved in ways designed to make the reader think, “how clever!” Two primary characters from the first novel return: the American professor Morris Zapp, now divorced, and the British professor Philip Swallow, marriage now on the rocks. The primary new focus is a young Irish instructor Persse McGarrigle, who is on a grail-quest (Persse = Sir Percival) to capture the heart of the beautiful, mysterious young scholar Angelica Pabst. Throughout the 340 pages of my copy, we are joined by professors and their wives and lovers in a globe-trotting satire of academic conferences.
Oh, wait. In this book, professors are allowed to be female or gay, too. But only a few of them.
If you’re familiar with the meme of male authors writing women as “breasting boobily” down the stairs, well, that’s Lodge’s writing. Never has a man been more dedicated to describing the motions of the female breast, and especially its nipple. How does so much of this fit into an ensemble cast, dozen+ setting satire of academia, you ask? Great fucking question.
I really don’t want to honor this book with a discussion of its themes or plot. What I want to talk about is its reputation, and Lodge’s reputation as one of the funniest and most brilliant satirists of academia. My copy of Small World is a 1995 printing, so let’s pretend that forgives its cover blurbs. But why, then, is Lodge’s work in so many current digital lists of the best campus novels? Why is it in one of the Shibboleth reviews, as a better example of the form? Why do I run across offhand recommendations when reading recent articles in the Chronicles of Higher Ed? Why did the third novel in the trilogy receive a nomination for the Booker prize? Why is all of this praise sung without a word of caution for the narrative treatment of the women?
Lodge has a careful eye for the types of social oddities that make a great caricature, and so I think that his books tread a fine line—they accurately and bitingly portray a (male) professor’s egoism, or bigotry, or intellectual shortcomings, or cruelty, in moments too vibrant to be entirely fictional. Clearly, there is a very real and keen observation of how professors fail their friends, family, and colleagues at the heart of this book. But the wives come in for it too, wearing sexy or frumpy pyjamas, having breasts and butts which sag from age-related weight gain, or perhaps they are given perky tits to remind us that this woman, in contrast, is sharp and young. And so although each disgusting or selfish or foolhardy man is made into a joke at some point, so too are many of the non-academic women around them, who don’t want enough sex or want too much sex or want the wrong type of sex, in ways which have only passing relevance to the critiques of academia.
So it’s overall a major distraction, and the satire is weakened to the point where I begin to question its value. And Lodge is careful and observant, and describes a culture and an era that I see value in having documented—but it’s not worth reading at this cost, and frankly, it’s not worth recommending, even for the historical value, without heavy caveats. Which I have never seen done.
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Date: 2025-07-28 05:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-28 06:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-30 05:33 am (UTC)Yes! Based on my extremely scientific survey, the publisher's marketing department would have done better to lay off the romance talk and focus on relentlessly hyping the pedagogy. :)
I talked some in my post about what I wanted to see more of about the Phoenix. And I also would like to know a lot more about the other schools of magic, and maybe if there are other specializations within invocation. Like, is there such a thing as an invocation theorist? Because I feel like that's what I would want to be in this universe.
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Date: 2025-07-28 01:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-28 06:21 pm (UTC)I read the 1- and 2-star Goodreads reviews last night to reassure myself that I was not the sole observer of misogyny in this book. It was comforting.