Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror

James Hynes

New York: Picador, 1997; pp. 338

This can't be happening to me. I've got tenure.

This may be what Edgar Allan Poe would have written if he had an inkling that the hallowed halls of academia are far more spooky and treacherous than your average medieval castle or a haunted mansion. I have yet to be walled inside my office or be supernaturally impaled on a statue, but dragging my Ph.D. branded tail behind me has been somewhat scary especially since just about every senior colleague can easily trample on it. (OK, I exaggerate, but you get my point.)

Hynes offers three witty novellas in this collection, of which the first and the last are probably much better than the middle one. In the first, a feline by the name of Charlotte dispenses supernatural wrath on a cheating weakling of a husband who uses his wife's absence to quell his feelings of personal inadequacy by bedding a sultry graduate student. As someone with an impending two-body problem and a feminist wife who makes Elizabeth seem like a meek nun, I found some resonance in it, and have vowed to keep a cat just as proof of innocence.

The second story is the weakest link in the book mostly because it is derivative of just about every cult story from the 1960s onward (for especially telling similarities, check out the excellent film The Wicker Man, that features essentially the same plot and a main character who is no less self-righteous and self-loving than Greg). It's basically the same old idea of a guy who ends up in the British countryside (where many spooky things happen) and who unwittingly becomes the centerpiece of a weird pagan ritual, usually involving the sacrifice of said centerpiece.

The last novella is about a budding historian who is hounded by a lecherous, untalented senior colleague trying to steal her cutting edge work. The supernatural twist is that he's doing it by supernatural means: It involves casting runes and black magic, and I can't tell you more about it. The most refreshing part of this story has to be the scene at the conference where three male (and semi-male) professors get assaulted by a bunch of radical feminists (grrls). I loved it.

The three novellas are sort of linked together because characters from each pop here and there, but there's nothing really tying them together except that the protagonists are all academics. There's plenty of satire on the empty jargon-filled mumbo-jumbo that passes for serious work in many fields (especially the humanities), and a lot of implicit criticism of the seniority system, the tenuring process, and academic life in general. All served deliciously twisted with the unreal.

The writing is lucid and quite enjoyable, I do not know how many non-academics will appreciate Hynes wit mostly because it requires not only passing familiarity with the great debates that he mentions (and that nobody outside of academia would care about or even understand enough to care about), the arcane rules and fears of the tenure process, or the strange male-dominated relations in the sacred halls. I, for one, found it quite entertaining.

March 21, 2003

@book{hynes-97,
    title     = {Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror},
    author    = {James Hynes},
    year      = {1997},
    publisher = {Picador},
    address   = {New York},
    isbn      = {0-312-18696-7}
}