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 Posté le: Mer Sep 25, 2013 12:17 pm Sujet du message: Campus novel at top of its class |
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{Campus novel at top of its class}
The DilettantesBy Michael HingstonFreehand Books (Broadview Press)-----The campus novel (sometimes called the academic novel) is a story whose main action takes place on a university campus, a setting that provides many advantages to a writer — it is an enclosed space where characters like the randy professor, the angry feminist and the dim bulb jock butt up against each other, figuratively and literally, and where the contrast between the notion of the university as a promoter of truth and the reality of the ignobility of mankind is at its most ironic. And with campuses more rife with illicit sex and power politics than any legislature in the land, the fictive possibilities of the campus novel are many. The novel under discussion here, The Dilettantes, is a campus novel. It takes place up the mountain on the Burnaby campus of Simon Fraser University (SFU), and there isn’t a randy professor in sight (though there are randy students, but they spend more time talking about sex than doing it). This is not to the novel’s detriment — The Dilettantes crackles with wit, humour and intelligence and is a terrific debut from writer and Edmonton Journal books columnist Michael Hingston.The story plays out in the editorial offices of the Peak, the SFU student newspaper. In an online interview, Hingston says that he “couldn’t believe nobody had written a novel about a student newspaper before. It seemed so obvious. The comedy is almost automatic: a group of people in a low-stakes situation, taking everything very, very seriously. And then at the same time being almost literally too lazy to function.”The main characters of The Dilettantes are Alex Belmont and Tracy Shaw, two editors who are trying to counter student indifference to the very existence of the Peak, which is hard to do given the imminent arrival on campus of Metro, a free, big-money daily. How can the Peak revive students’ interest in their own university newspaper? How can the editors stem the tide of advertisers jumping ship (most of whom have actually always hated the left-leaning campus rag and welcome the excuse to leave)? Perhaps a scoop will come along, such as an exposé about a mysterious filmed-on-campus video that has gone viral. Perhaps troubled Hollywood star Duncan Holtz, who returns to SFU to finish his degree and run for student council, will be the catalyst for rebirth.The cut and thrust of life at a university student newspaper might not seem like the most spellbinding of themes, but Hingston makes it work by doing a number of things right — the dialogue is funny and spot on, and the satire alternately nips, bites and rips your head off. On the relationship between Tracy and her boyfriend, we learn that “things did indeed get awkward between them, just as the prophet Judd Apatow had foretold” (Apatow is largely responsible for the hit movies The Forty-Year-Old Virgin, Bridesmaids and Girls). And Hingston assumes that his readers are not just literate but culturally literate; the prose is peppered with rapid-fire disparate cultural touchstones — the panopticon of Jeremy Bentham, Homer Simpson, the SkyTrain, Jean Baudrillard, Sundance,[url=http://woolrich-parkaoutlet.blogspot.com]woolrich jackets[/url], Comic Sans, Arthur Ericksen, Isis, Enigma, no soap radio and the Aristocrats.
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