Ms. Mentor, the Chronicle of Higher Ed's wonderfully acerbic alternative to Miss Manners, asks readers to recommend "newish academic novels that will delight and instruct her readers," noting that Richard Russo's Straight Man is her current favorite.

Being a campus novel junkie, I wholly support her query and reiterate it here. Russo's novel is truly hilarious, one of those rarities that will actually make you laugh out loud as you read along (it also marks a departure for him, as he's usually writing searching, elegiac, terribly sad and touching novels about life in the dying mill towns of upstate New York--if you have not read Empire Falls or Bridge of Sighs do, and then watch the excellent HBO adaptation of the first with Helen Hunt and Ed Harris and Paul Newman and Philip Seymour Hoffman).

Straight Man is funny for the same reason many campus novels are claustrophobic--they tend to be written in a broad, satiric style that works to emphasize the "you can't make this up" character of academic life. No matter how overdone, over the top, or overdetermined campus novel characters and plots are, one winds up feeling that one is reading realism. You know the characters, and you've seen the story lines played out in actual life. And the tension that creates--between the writer's attempt to parody academic reality and that reality's ready power to absorb and even outdo its own parody--is claustrophobic and funny by turns. You feel you've already been in the plot that David Lodge or Philip Roth or Francine Prose is crafting--and the result is that you begin to feel that the real object of the author's parody is ultimately yourself.

That awareness never altered my enjoyment of academic fiction, but it did make me think about the alternatively self-flattering and masochistic professional narcissism to which such novels ultimately appeal. One of the most intriguing things about the genre of campus fiction is its popularity among those whose ways and means it skewers; the skewering seems to work more to confirm those ways and means than otherwise. Academics enjoy reading about what fools and dolts academics are--as long as they are doing it in a fictional context and the person calling them fools and dolts is one of their own (a striking number of campus novelists have academic appointments). This is all part of the claustrophobic, involuted mystique of the genre.

That said, there are some campus novels that rise above all that (even as they contain it), and happen to be very good works of fiction. I'd count among them Philip Roth's amazing Human Stain and Francine Prose's Blue Angel, both of which I've read several times, and both of which use the hothouse quality of academic life to limn some of the darker corners of the American psyche. David Mamet does this in his play-cum-film Oleanna, as well, though it is so intensely claustrophobic that I can barely watch it. Then there are Zadie Smith's On Beauty, which does a Howard's End on Harvard, and Donna Tartt's overlong but compulsively readable The Secret History, which is a sort of drunken morality tale about what happens when students really take the classics seriously. In a class by itself is A.S. Byatt's Possession, which remains for me (and I suspect for many) an immensely evocative wish-fulfillment fantasy of historical research, with special appeal for Victorianists.

I'm less enamored of the more broadly comic campus novels--Kingsley Amis, David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury, Jane Smiley, and, most recently, Roger Rosenblatt, whose Beet I found as strained as Russo's Straight Man is supple.

You?