She frowned and then handed me The Lecturer's Tale by James Hynes. 'Try this,' she said. 'I think you won't be disappointed.'

I did. And I wasn't. She hadn't been lying. The book was that rare thing: the genuinely funny Academic novel of manners.

The Lecturer's Tale--written about three years back-- is not just a literary thriller but a literary theory thriller. It is where Stephen King meets Camille Paglia via Woody Allen: a suspenseful, brilliant, and blackly comic novel of intellectual shenanigans in one of America's Ivy League universities.

Since finishing The Lecturer's Tale I have done some homework on Hynes. As well as caught up with the two other books of the same genre: Moo by Jane Smiley and David Lodge's Thinks. The way writers go skewering academia, you'd think there was something undeniably dubious and funny about academic life. And out of these three books, one gets the distinct feeling that it is Hynes who relishes skewering academia the most, and has done it with more inventiveness than the other two. His is the more sly, and therefore funnier, account of cultural studies, literary theory and star systems. The title of his first novel was Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror (!) -- where there was enough satirical edge and accuracy to have the reader laughing knowingly even before cracking open the covers of the book. It is three horrific, hilarious novellas about university life, where "Derrida rules and love is a complicated ideological position."

In The Lecturer's Tale, if I may be allowed to speak the speech, Hynes zeroed in on a site worthy of intervention: the culture wars currently raging on American campuses (and perhaps on a few Indian campuses as well?). And which show no signs of abating. Literary theory, post-modernism, gender studies, political correctness, queer theory, post-colonial interventions and radical scholars vs. Literature, Dead White Male Authors, Passed-Over White Professors, Lecturers who get a little too friendly with their students and Creative Writers, i.e. prize-winning, alcoholic novelists and poets.

It tells the story of Nelson Humboldt, trapped between the ideological faction-fighting of the English Department. The Canon Men on one side, and everybody else on the other. Since Nelson's a lowly adjunct professor he discovers that neither side will have him. Worse, as a fair-minded, weak liberal caught between the Canon conservatives and the literary theory radicals, he can't but appreciate the merits of both positions: legs on both sides, the fence coming right up the middle.

Growing up, Nelson falls in love with classics and sets off to college to major in Lit. Once there, Nelson is lost: he can't understand the hostility reserved for the Canon. "An innocent and self-evident remark he had made in class about Conrad's jumbled chronologies raised snorts of derision from his classmates. A severe young woman from the Indian subcontinent addressed Nelson without looking at him, telling him painfully, in a posh imperial accent that Conrad's racism was the starting point for any discussion of his work. `Read Edward Said,' she added, in a curt postcolonial sotto voce." Sharpened by such confrontations, Nelson eventually morphs into a less naive English lecturer, but still can't understand his colleagues "who had begun to surf the tide of post-modernism, happily so, since it allowed them to ditch their mediocre dissertations on Milton and Pound and do cutting edge work on Ally McBeal, the X-Men, Star Trek: The New Generation and the complete works of David. E. Kelly."

But all this changes when his index finger, injured in a freak accident, suddenly gives him the power to make others do what he wants them to do-- all he has to do is touch them with that finger. The "Midas/Prospero of Academia" now has the power to influence the outcome of the battle being waged in the English department. He'd also like to do some good in the bargain... like getting on the tenure-track.

This is where Hynes parts company with David Lodge and Jane Smiley, for not content with writing a novel of academic manners, he turns this into a gothic horror novel about a Faustian pact with the Devil.

The characters arrayed on both sides of the divide are impeccably drawn and lampooned. The novel's wicked tone and knowingness is best conveyed by looking at its cast of characters.

The chairperson of the department, Anthony Pescecane, "with his Armani suits, silk ties and Italian shoes, physical workouts and foul mouth resembled a mafia boss and he knew it". He saw himself as "the Michael Corleone of literary theory, the Tony Soprano of pedagogy". Victoria Victorinix, the department's tenured full prof and its best-known lesbian, has "survived three or four paradigm shifts in literary theory". African-American Lester Antilles, the heftiest of the lot in post-colonial studies refused to do his Ph.D. as a protest against the "objectifying colonialist gaze on native subjects". In practice, this meant he refused to teach or attend seminars or publish. And for this "demanding and theoretically sophisticated subaltern intervention in the dominant discourse, he was given an endowed chair and a bigger salary than the president of the United States."

Professor Stephen Michael Stephen, the school's token African-American appointment, is popular with students because his classes consist only of seeing movies like "Khartoum", "The Sand Pebbles", "55 Days At Peking" and "Lawrence of Arabia" which were used to "introduce his students to issues of race, imperialism and post-colonial theory." The Serb Marko Kraljevic, the department's premier theorist, sees himself as an "intellectual samurai, the Toshiro Mifune of cultural studies." The radical graduate student, Gillian (doing her dissertation on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer") who "has dispensed with her patriarchal surname, in the spirit of such foremothers as Roseanne, Cher and Madonna. She had a military buzz cut, wore a tank-top T-shirt, a denim mini-skirt, torn fishnet stockings, and black, steel-toed Doc Martens. She looked like Irma La Douce played by Arnold Schwarzenegger."

On the other side of the faction are: Mort Weisman who compares Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology to a Molotov cocktail landing in academia. "Jacques the Ripper, Weismann called the new critical superstar, pleased at his own joke." Timothy Coogan, a fifty-year-old, alcoholic, prize-winning poet teaching creative writing with a reputation for playing around with his female students. "But because the creative writing faculty were not expected to be as evolved as real scholars, he had managed to escape sexual harassment proceedings". He can't see what poetry has to do with phallogocentrism. Then there is the Canadian Lady Novelist whose name nobody can remember. "She was reputed to be like Margaret Atwood, only nicer."

Anybody who has spent some time in the Eng. Lit Dept. of an American university will find that Hynes knows his Lit theory well enough to parody it. He caricatures both sides and shows us why both may have gone too far in defending their ideologies. If you are an academic (or an academic dropout like me), whether you are in an American campus or South Asian one, this send-up of the groves of academe will have you grinning in recognition.

I wish I had laid my hands on this book a little earlier.

M. Peeradina is a Bangalore-based journalist/free-lance writer.