Rebecca Makkai: Best Campus Novels
By Little, Brown Book Group
Rebecca Makkai: Best Campus Novels
By Little, Brown Book Group
I love a campus novel. The hothouse environment, the limited timeframe, the permanent nature of the place contrasted with the transitory nature of its population. When I decided to set my new novel, I Have Some Questions for You, largely on the campus of New Hampshire boarding school, I was keenly aware of both the possibilities of the genre and its tired cliches. (It’s always October! The leaves are always turning! But it’s mostly nighttime! And everyone dresses like it’s 1952, even today!) The fact that some of my favorite authors have avoided or subverted those tired conventions was comforting and galvanizing.
My list of favorite books that use academia as a setting is practically uncuttable, but I can give you four favorites by thinking of one category at a time: summer camp, boarding school, university, graduate school, and alternate reality.
The Interestings
Meg Wolitzer
£9.99 £9.49I might be cheating a bit here, but I do consider Meg Wolitzer’s 2014 novel The Interestings to be a campus novel. Yes, it’s set at a summer camp for the performing arts rather than at an accredited academic institution, but we still have a limited cast of characters coming of age together on an isolated patch of land. Camp, campus—what’s the difference? We follow three camp friends from the 1970s to the 2010s, asking what promises and curses we carry with us from adolescence. That a novel this long and this character-driven and realist can still be propulsive is a testament to the way Wolitzer imbues everyday moments with their full importance.
The Devil and Webster
Jean Hanff Korelitz
£9.99 £9.49A young woman graduating from the Siddons School and attending camp at Wolitzer’s Spirt-in-the-Woods might then have found herself at small and selective Webster College, the fictional setting for Jean Hanff Korelitz’s 2017 novel The Devil and Webster. Rather than a student’s point of view, we get that of the new and beleaguered college president, Naomi Roth, as she navigates a scandal that ultimately involves her own daughter, a freshman at the school. It’s a thought-provoking novel, a page turner that challenges our notions of fairness and justice.
Bunny: TikTok made me buy it!
Mona Awad
£9.99 £9.49If the Siddons and Webster graduate really had it in for herself, she might next attempt graduate school in creative writing. Mona Awad’s 2020 novel Bunny is addictive and impossible to describe, the kind of book I’ve literally placed in friends’ hands and told them to start reading immediately, not looking anything up first online. Since you’re already online, I’ll tell you that it’s the story of a young woman enrolled in an MFA writing program, where her cliquish female classmates embrace her and then (bear with me) conjure up monstrous, bunny-headed boyfriends whom they murder in bloody rituals that feed their creativity. But ignore all that; just read it.
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
£9.99 £9.49Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go is, of course, a work of science fiction, but despite its dystopian trappings, I still see it fundamentally as a boarding school book. Originally titled The Student’s Novel, the book juxtaposes its dark themes of involuntary servitude and lost autonomy with delightfully mundane concerns like protagonist Kathy H.’s quest to find a certain cassette tape. That uncanny coupling of the real and surreal is a big part of what makes the novel undismissable. School is a place we all know—if not exactly like this one, then similar enough. We might have grown into wildly different careers and adulthoods, but the near-universal commonalities of studenthood allow us to relate even to fates like Kathy’s that we’d rather not come near.