Let me simply admit it: I'm a sucker for academic novels.  And I am hardly the only English professor who feels this way.  After all, most academic wordsmiths are frustrated novelists, attracted to fiction as the way to a delicious payback and a fast buck.  Which self-respecting lit professor hasn't thought -- either out loud or in private -- about knocking off a tale of the assorted troubles at his or her version of Eyesore U?  The formula seems simple enough: plant a sensitive young professor in a garden of academic vipers, add a fetching student here and a soused administrator there, and voilà, yet another novel about higher education on the ropes.

The rub, of course, is that most of the academic novels that find their way into print are lackluster affairs: cardboard characters meander along predictable plot lines and in the process, a few satiric blows are delivered against political correctness gone amuck.  At one point the target of choice was man-hating feminists, at another, it was  literature-hating literary theorists.  But taken together, the bulk of what passes as "academic fiction" is a far cry from examples of the Real Thing: Mary McCarthy's  The Group and Groves of Academe, Bernard Malamud's A New Life, or Jane Smiley's Moo.  Granted, my listing is hardly complete, I have omitted British classics such as Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim along with  the wonderful romps of David Lodge (Changing Places and A Small World).  And, yes, there are great novelists who work in other countries and in other languages.  But my central point remains the same: academic novels worth their salt are novels first, and  "academic" later.

Harbach has large ambitions for his first novel.  As Henry movingly describes the game of baseball:

Much of the novel's  focus is on Madeline Hanna, a "heroine" who became an English major because (gulp!) she liked to read books.  Alas, this came at a time when "heavy water" theory held sway and it goes almost without saying that Brown University doesn't want to be left out.

As we make our way through "Semiotics 202," and learn, by reading large chunks of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, that deconstructive critics write far more -- and far less interestingly -- than authors who write novels.  Eugenides's title not only refers to ways  of reading novels about love-and-marriage by the likes of Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Henry James, but also to Madeline's senior thesis as well as her real-life "mating dance" with two very different Brown undergraduates, one bipolar, the other, passive-aggressive.

Eugenides's novel means to give traditional fiction an interesting twist, one that reaffirms, rather than "deconstructs," the relationship of fiction to the human condition and to truth.  Put another way, Eugenides, like Harbach, is a novelist who sees the academic world both steady and whole, and both novelists realize instinctively that a college campus is more than so much backdrop; in the right hands, it can serve as an important supporting character, one that puts the major players into bold relief.