3 campus-set novels that explore the messy melodrama of being a student
Before she entered the hallowed halls of university, Talia Kliot loved reading stories set on a campus to prepare her for what academia might be like.
When the time finally came, the Montreal-raised Kliot joined the generation of students having the unique experience of starting university virtually in 2020. In her quarantined classroom, Kliot returned to those campus tales with "a bit of longing for what could have been."
In hindsight, Kliot notes that a draw of campus-set novels is how readers can reflect on the dramatic moments of a young person's life.
"People are branching out of the communities that they've grown up in and the age of 18 to 24 is about growth and coming of age," said Kliot. "Everyone's making mistakes… Also there's just an arrogance and an idealism of youth which maybe I have — I hope not — but it makes for great satire."
The CBC Books associate producer and The Next Chapter columnist spoke with Ali Hassan about three of her favourite satirical campus novels.
Come and Get It by Kiley Reid
Come and Get It begins at the University of Arkansas in 2017. Millie is a senior resident assistant who just wants to graduate and enter full-fledged adulthood. And when a visiting professor offers that opportunity, Millie is ready to do anything in order to move on — that is, until several of her bad-behaving peers work to jeopardize her chances. Come and Get It is a tense satirical novel about friendship, desire and academia.
"The writing is honest, but not judgmental," Kliot said. "It paints a real picture of [students] and is a real and fair picture of the characters. It's not mean, but it's also funny."
Kiley Reid is an American writer and assistant professor at the University of Michigan. Her debut novel, Such a Fun Age was longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize.
The Red Word by Sarah Henstra
In Sarah Henstra's novel The Red Word, a group of feminists at an American university plot to bring down a notorious fraternity after Karen, a college sophomore, wakes up one night on the fraternity's front lawn. As part of an elaborate plan for payback, Karen finds herself immersed in fraternity party culture while becoming further integrated into feminist activism.
The Red Word examines consent, rape culture and politics as they play out on a mid-1990s college campus. It won the 2018 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction.
"It's really smart the way [Henstra] plays with this because we have the frat boys who embody Greek life in the fraternity culture sense of the term and then the women of Raghurst, they're really enthralled with study of Greek life in the classical sense and analyzing Greek texts and practices through a feminist lens," Kliot said.
Henstra is a Toronto-based writer and academic. She is also the author of We Contain Multitudes and Mad Miss Mimic.
Bunny by Mona Awad
In Bunny, scholarship student Samantha Heather Mackey feels like an outsider at her elite university, especially when it comes to her fiction writing class. That's where she first encounters the Bunnies, a comically tight-knit group of annoying rich girls who invite Samantha to their exclusive "Smut Salon." Against her better judgment, Samantha is drawn into the Bunnies' orbit.
"The lines of fiction and reality are often really blurred in these spaces where people are learning to write. There's a lot of thinly veiled autobiography so it was super interesting to see the way the more fantastical elements of the writing of Bunny come to life in that way for real too," Kliot said.
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Mona Awad's Bunny is a twisted novel inspired by teen movies, fairy tales and the horror of academia
Bunny is the second book by Mona Awad. Her first, the linked short story collection 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, was shortlisted for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize and won the 2016 Amazon.ca First Novel Award. Awad was born in Montreal and currently lives in Boston.
