The university even more quickly became basic to the careers of younger writers. You can see this in the way it suddenly intrudes, like a dissonant chord, in the sophomore work of World Lit authors: the trace of the moment when they took their first teaching job. Dinaw Mengestu, whose first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007), was an assured first-person narrative by an Ethiopian émigré shopkeeper in a gentrifying neighborhood of Washington, DC, wrote a second novel, How to Read the Air (2010), narrated by an Ethiopian émigré teacher of literature. The narrator of the earlier book told a straightforward story of flight from a failed revolution; the second novel told a similar story, but presented it metafictionally in a classroom setting. Junot Díaz shifted from his chronicles of down-and-out Dominicans in Drown (1996) to an American campus in Oscar Wao, where the eponymous character is obsessed, cultural studies–style, with the semiological analysis of comic books and science fiction. The very first word of Adichie’s third novel, Americanah (2013), is “Princeton.” No law of literature says the university can’t be the setting of great fiction, but it says something about the difficulty of the feat that the best example we can think of—DeLillo’s White Noise—was written by a writer who has never taught at one.
Posted on: Sat, 17 Aug 2013 18:44:50 +0000