Farcical 'Life Of The Mind' Skewers Academic Life And Adjunct 'Hell'

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. We've all heard the phrase the unexamined life is not worth living, but what about the overly examined life? Can thinking too much drain the pleasure out of life? Our book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews "The Life Of The Mind," a wry debut novel that mulls over those very questions and more.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: The opening scene of Christine Smallwood's sharp debut novel called "The Life Of The Mind" finds her main character, Dorothy, locked into the stall of a public bathroom. Dorothy spends a lot of time locked in bathrooms. She's having a prolonged miscarriage, which means there are long intervals every day when she's sitting and thinking on the toilet. By profession, Dorothy is a thinker. She's a graduate student in literature stuck, as she acknowledges, in adjunct professor hell. She teaches up to four courses a semester at an elite university, all the while trying and failing to make progress on her dissertation, which appropriately happens to be about female confinement and the Gothic novel. Here's Dorothy ruminating over her stuck position in life.

(Reading) Last fall there had been six job openings in her field. This fall there had been none. The hiring climate had dried into a dust bowl. She couldn't go on like this, she knew, but she couldn't not go on. She vaguely recalled a time when wanting to do the job she had trained for did not feel like too much to want. Now want itself was a thing of the past. She lived in the epilogue of wants.

"The Life Of The Mind" is about endings that dribble to a close, the inexorable erosion of dreams, the slow leak of youthful buoyancy. It's about being youngish at a time in history when it feels like many things might be fading away, including the natural world. The great accomplishment of Smallwood's taught novel is that while it is indeed about all those grim subjects, it's also one of the wittiest, most deliciously farcical novels I've read in a long time.

Much of the humor here is rooted in the claustrophobic world of academia, where everyone vies to be the big fish in a shrinking and unsustainably fetid pond. Dorothy had once been a rising star, thanks to a published essay on Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca," but after a decade in grad school, she's gone stale, even as she can't imagine what else to do, which brings us to the extended comic highlight of this novel - the academic conference.

Smallwood's genius is to take this professional ritual of cutthroat networking and jargon-encrusted performative presentations and set it in Las Vegas. If a career in academia, especially in the humanities, is a crapshoot, what better site for a conference than this landscape of slot machines and empty spectacle?

Dorothy, as ever, tries hard to have a smart take on Las Vegas, yet the city's pleasure-loving mindlessness defeats her. At the interminable conference, Dorothy runs into her dissertation adviser, a manipulative diva who's the reason why Dorothy has sought out the services of not one but two therapists simultaneously - one of whom, of course, has a podcast.

Dorothy also stumbles into her old grad school boyfriend, who, when they were together, had a kinky predilection for whispering Frank O'Hara poems into, well, not her ear. As I once heard the mystery novelist and humorist Lisa Scottoline say, if it doesn't make you wince, it's not funny. Wince-inducing moments thicken the pages of Smallwood's inventive novel. So, too, do literary allusions.

A degree in the humanities may not be enough to get Dorothy a tenure-track job, but it's undeniably helpful in terms of getting some of the jokes here that involve references to Samuel Beckett and George Eliot's "Middlemarch" and the work of one of America's first doomsday prophets, Jonathan Edwards.

"The Life Of The Mind" isn't anti-intellectual. It doesn't disparage Dorothy's erudition, acquired by years of hard work, and it certainly doesn't exalt the vacuity of Vegas as a symbol of happiness. Instead, the novel takes aim at the kind of reflexive, critical thinking that's never turned off. Dorothy overanalyzes everything from doorknobs to stuffed animal toys and makes herself, to paraphrase "Hamlet," sick with thought. If only she could learn to laugh sometimes, as this vastly entertaining novel of ideas encourages us readers to do, her narrow world might expand.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "The Life Of The Mind" by Christine Smallwood.

Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, my guest will be Reuben Jonathan Miller, author of the new book "Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, And The Afterlife Of Mass Incarceration." His new book is part memoir - his father and brothers have been incarcerated, and Miller spent four years in foster care - but it's also a sociological study. He spent years following the lives of men and women after they were released from prison and faced hundreds of policies and laws that restrict the jobs they're allowed to hold, where they're allowed to live and more. He teaches at the University of Chicago. I hope you'll join us.

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GROSS: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Therese Madden, Ann Marie Baldonado, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelley and Kayla Lattimore. Our associate producer of digital media is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. I'm Terry Gross.

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