Product Description

Nelson Humboldt is a visiting adjunct English lecturer at prestigious Midwest University, until he is unceremoniously fired one autumn morning. Minutes after the axe falls, his right index finger is severed in a freak accident. Doctors manage to reattach the finger, but when the bandages come off, Nelson realizes that he has acquired a strange power—he can force his will onto others with a touch of his finger. And so he obtains an extension on the lease of his university-owned townhouse and picks up two sections of freshman composition, saving his career from utter ruin. But soon these victories seem inconsequential, and Nelson's finger burns for even greater glory. Now the Midas of academia wonders if he can attain what every struggling assistant professor and visiting lecturer covets—tenure. The Lecturer's Tale is a pitch-perfect blend of satire and horror.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #191475 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Splicing a demonic strain into the usual elements of academic comedy, Hynes's novel, following his acclaimed Publish or Perish, reads like David Lodge rewritten by Mikhail Bulgakov. After Nelson Humboldt (the lecturer in question) is dismissed from his lowly position as a composition teacher at a Midwestern university, he suffers an accident that severs his right index finger. When the finger is surgically reattached, Nelson discovers he can magically control a person's behavior by touching them with his mysteriously burning digit. His first act is to get reappointed to his post by the woman who fired him--Victoria Victorinix. This is only the warmup. Someone is sending scurrilous anonymous letters to members of the department, and the department chairperson, Anthony Pescacane, has fingered the poet-in-residence, Timothy Coogan, as the man. Nelson "persuades" Coogan to resign, thus opening up a tenure-track position. This job, Nelson decides, should go to his office mate, Vita Deonne, a skittish woman working on "Dorian Gray's Lesbian Phallus." Nelson's new seat on the hiring committee puts him in a key spot to broker the ideological fracture in the department, which pits Morton Weissman's Arnoldian humanism against Pescacane's contingent of cultural theorists, who include a woman who shows porn films to her class and a bizarre Serb with a costume fetish. As Nelson, like some usurping Prospero, begins strategically to instill fear into his colleagues by changing their reality, he attracts the attention of Pescacane's departmental paramour, the luscious Mirando DeLa Tour. Nelson's support for Vita fades as he makes a self-interested pact with Victoria. He also, unforgivably, uses his finger to control his wife, Bridget. In Hynes's ferocious parable, partial power corrupts absolutely. Author tour. (Jan.)Forecast: As Jane Smiley's spoof of academia, Moo, and David Lodge's novels have shown, satires of academic manners can reflect the foibles of society at large. Hynes's witheringly literate dark comedy should be a campus hit this spring, and word of mouth potential could lead to mainstream sales.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
This macabre, sort of magic realist satire takes dead aim at some of the pretensions of the academic world, notably among English professors. The protagonist is Nelson Humboldt, a once bright star in the English department at Midwest University but now reduced to teaching composition classes. Never one to publish much, Nelson's academic career is on the verge of perishing. That is until he realizes he has accidentally (in the literal sense) acquired a magic power over people that allows him to bend them to his will. Hynes paints a good picture of the paranoia of the junior faculty as well as the pomposity of New Critics, postmodernists, deconstructionists, and various types of gender benders. The book spins a little out of control by the conclusion, but by then he's achieved his goal of turning a likable character into a megalomaniac while still maintaining the reader's sympathy. Frank Caso
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"The most devasting satirical portrait of contemporary academic life I've ever read."—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World

"[Hynes] writes so brilliantly, inventively, and lovingly about the sins of academe that the reader ends up, like Milton's Satan, even more eager to serve in Hell."—Chronicle of Higher Education

"A full-blown academic farce. Hynes has hit on a brilliant ploy in weaving Gothic horror with contemporary lit crit."—Tobin Harshaw, The New York Times Book Review

"Hynes bathes his ship of overeducated fools in such luscious detail (the trends! the allusions! the hairstyles!) that he vaults to the head of the crowded class of academic satirists."—Kirkus Reviews

"Near perfection . . . The Lecturer's Tale is an arch academic horror story where no chain-rattling ghost could hold a candle to the terror that is a power-hungry English department chairman. It's is also a very funny, very dark satire that does more to deflate academic pretense than any earnest political lament ever could."—The Hartford Courant

"The Lecturer's Tale is rowdy and brilliant—pointedly literate and scathingly funny all at once."—Texas Monthly

"A delight to read . . . It is the kind of book that all of us who spend hour upon hour trying to achieve consensus in ideological divided committees fantasize about writing someday (if only we had Hynes's talent)."—Eliza Nichols, Boston Review

"A daring comic novel . . . [that will] leave readers happy."—Entertainment Weekly

"More than just a ribald tale of modern misbehavior among the learned class, The Lecturer's Tale sings a song of fervent love for the English language."—The Austin Chronicle

"Ferocious . . . Splicing a demonic strain into the usual elements of academic comedy, Hynes's novel . . . reads like David Lodge rewritten by Mikhail Bulgakov."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"[A] wickedly funny academic horror novel."—Polly Shulman, Newsday

"A wild, laugh-out-loud ride."—Carrie Harrison, San Francisco Chronicle

"[Hynes] has a knack for exploding academic stereotypes into hyperbole so unreal that it's giddily true . . . An acidulously droll spoof."—The Commercial Appeal
-- Review

Customer Reviews

Hynes Scores a Bull's-Eye
Hynes's previous book, "Publish and Perish," was an academic satire like "The Lecturer's Tale," but "P & P" had stronger supernatural elements, and in any case was composed of three discrete novellas. "The Lecturer's Tale" has more than a touch of the supernatural, too--indeed, spookiness is an essential part of the plot--but as a novel it's more of a unified whole, and consequently succeeds brilliantly as pure satire, with or without ghosts. In its merciless mockery of modern academic trends--literary theory, deconstruction, identity politics, and the like--and in its shrewd understanding of human ambition and the absurd machinations people resort to for the sake of promotion, fame, and the respect of others, "The Lecturer's Tale" stands head and shoulders above others in the genre. It makes Hynes a worthy claimant to the late Malcolm Bradbury's mantle as the dean of academic satirists. It certainly made this reader wary of ever having anything to do with university English departments. Yet, despite its mockery, it's not a mean-spirited book. Hynes is a compassionate writer, sometimes excessively so; indeed, one of the book's few weaknesses is the extent to which he occasionally bends over backward to demonstrate even-handedness, setting up somewhat clichéd villains such as the sexist drunken Irish bard and the supercilious old-school Jewish intellectual as if to emphasize the objectivity of his satirical vision elsewhere. But these are quibbles. Overall, "The Lecturer's Tale" is a masterpiece of plotting, satire, and storytelling, and a real page-turner to boot, with one or two comic sequences reminiscent not only of Bradbury but of Kingsley Amis at his most incisive.

A Perfect Sendup
This is a wonderful sendup of academia, particularly Liberal Arts colleges and the whole field of literary criticism. The book is loaded with puns and literary references, which will be appreciated by the literate reader. Even the protagonist's name is a a joke ("Humbolt's Gift", a tip of the hat to Saul Bellow).

While this is a very funny satiric piece, it will probably appeal more to readers who have some exposure to academic life and the quest for tenure, or who have ever broken their teeth on murky postmodern literary crit. It is also fun to identify the real-life models for the archetypal denizens of the fictional Midwest University (The Canadian Lady Novelist can only be one person ...).

A highly recommended read, amusing to the point of farce, but clever enough to make you feel the author is winking at you. A "Moo U." for English departments.

Irrational Hierarchy
Hynes' satire, I'm afraid, has only genius, wit, and charm to recommend it. The indignities of being low man on the totem pole in an environment scrupulously bent on "caring" and other 12-step misplacements have never been set forth so hilariously yet ultimately movingly. The notion that if you're not among the currently fashionable elite (God forbid you should be a heterosexual white male who has his head on straight), you're ripe for guilt-free, even gleeful neglect and mistreatment is most convincingly conveyed through the twists and turns of the plot, which shows the ugliness of hierarchical power divorced from justice. Judgments toward underlings are applied on the basis of whim by those "enlightened" types who wield power. This novel, like recent ones by Roth, Prose, and Coetzee, in its representation of reality, albeit satiric, reveals much more than current academe, in its money grubbing complacency can admit, much less bear.