Recommendations for Your Next Campus Novel
Returning from hiatus with 10 new book recommendations, in memoriam of youth
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Welcome back, readers! Thanks for sticking with me through this month’s brief hiatus. In my defense, it was for good reason: I was graduating from college! Onto becoming a real person. On a logistical note, Alienated Young Woman will be back in full force in June, with more reading guides, full-length reviews, and even some new content forms. Until then, I thought I’d welcome us back from our break with something thematically appropriate.
Square One: The Secret History
Donna Tartt (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992)
On the quiet grounds of Hampden College, middle-class transfer student Richard Papen’s life begins again when he’s hand-selected by Julian Morrow, an enigmatic, celebrated Classics professor, to be part of a small cohort of students under his private tutelage. But as Richard falls in with his elite classmates—secretive twins Charles and Camilla Macaulay, eccentric Francis Abernathy, their charismatic, intimidating leader Henry Winter, and the brash, hard-partying Bunny Corcoran, he begins to realize that more than just wealth separates him from his new friends. Soon, a school break gone wrong sends the group on an increasingly violent path, revealing the new life they’ve been introduced to at Hampden may be one that tests the bounds of beauty and terror, good and evil. There really is no other way to start this list.
If you haven’t gotten into this one, pause here. Published decades into the genre’s existence, The Secret History was ostensibly not the first campus novel, but if any of them can be considered “foundational,” it’s this almost certainly this one. On Tartt’s campus—inspired by the real-life Bennington College, the same campus that inspired Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman—the college clique is a kind of cult, the charismatic professor a minor god, and morals and even reality itself are fluid and testable. Tartt crafts The Secret History not just with unmatched prose, but with unmatched nuance in her understanding—and eventual subverting—of the campus novel. Tartt reimagines the coming of age as part adventure, part horror as she follows six young people on an uncertain, sometimes morbid, always fascinating journey to find a space for themselves in adulthood.
Moving Into the Contemporary Sphere:
The Idiot by Elif Batuman (Penguin Press, 2017) & Normal People by Sally Rooney (Faber & Faber, 2020)
Either we’ve entered a golden age of the campus novel, or we’re trapped in an age where anyone under 50 in the lit fic space is obligated to churn out a pensive, semi-autobiographical reflection on their time as a precocious but isolated young writer at a small but prestigious liberal arts college in the pre-Instagram era. Maybe we couldn’t have gotten to the former without the latter.
Neither of these next two novels have quite broached the icon status that The Secret History holds, but in their own ways, they’re definitive for this contemporary moment in the campus novel’s history.
First, in Elif Batuman’s modern classic The Idiot, it’s the late ‘90s, and shy, observant Selin is beginning her first year at Harvard. Inspired by Batuman’s real college experience, The Idiot follows Selin from her lonely, awkward first year on campus to a somehow even more awkward summer in Hungary, where she’s impulsively followed a budding crush. It’s the bildungsroman for the hyper-introspective.
In Normal People, Irish teenagers Marianne and Connell develop a complex relationship in high school that follows them into their new lives as students at Trinity College Dublin during the post-2008 Irish recession. Rooney’s second novel is distinct from many others on this list, in part because it follows its protagonists across two campuses, from the insular world of their high school to their reinventions at university.
Sirens and Muses by Antonia Angress (Ballantine Books, 2022)
It’s 2011, and the Occupy Wall Street movement is taking hold across the country—but in the hallowed, privileged halls of the elite Wrynn College of Art, it’s mostly grounds for performative action. Most students, like senior Preston Utley, a conceptual artist and self-proclaimed rebel, and sophomore Karina Piontek, a gifted but tortured painter, have more than enough generational wealth to nullify the rest of the country’s economic concerns. But for transfer student Louisa Arceneaux, a scholarship kid from rural Louisiana, the crisis is all too real. When a controversial artistic stunt throws all three students—and their professor, the once-cutting edge political painter Robert Berger—together (and out of Wrynn), the group is left struggling to navigate the exclusive New York art world without losing themselves in the process.
Sirens and Muses is probably the most straightforward “campus novel” on this list—characters experiment with untapped, more fluid identities, end long-held relationships and start new ones, learn to question the institutions they’ve been taught to respect, and stumble into a post-recession real world. But the tropes it does, it does well. If The Idiot and Normal People are definitive introductions to this era of the campus novel, Sirens and Muses might be its most exemplary entry. At the very least, it’s a solid point of entry to a genre with infinite offshoots.
Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou (Penguin Press, 2022)
At a small university in Massachusetts, longtime PhD student Ingrid Yang is attempting—mostly in vain—to finish a tedious dissertation on beloved Chinese-American poet Xiao-Wen Chou. Though happily engaged and settled on her path to become a professor, Ingrid still feels somehow out of place, cornered into “Chinese-y” research topics by an overzealous adviser and eager to abandon them altogether. Then, a mysterious note left in Chou’s archive sends Ingrid in hot pursuit of a winding mystery that could unlock the missing piece of her dissertation—but what she finds may be more than she bargained for.
Disorientation’s (slightly) older protagonist allows Chou to explore a different kind of bildungsroman, not quite a coming of age so much as coming into one’s own. Ingrid’s warp-speed, sometimes surreal adventure sends her through a hedge maze of false identities, incels, propaganda, and drug-laden misadventures, toward a new reckoning with herself and the institutions she belongs to. From performative activists to fetishistic academics, to PWIs, to Nice White Boyfriends, Chou’s biting, twist-filled satire leaves no one untouched. Suffice to say it’s a captivating, sometimes frustrating, but always entertaining read for anyone navigating academia’s labyrinthine realities.
Mother Ocean Father Nation by Nishant Batsha (Ecco, 2022)
In 1985, a small island nation in the South Pacific descends into unrest amid a military coup, and two siblings—rising academic star Bhumi and her listless older brother Jaipal—are forced apart. While Bhumi attempts to rebuild at a university in San Francisco, Jaipal is left behind, managing the family store, chasing fleeting opportunities in an increasingly unstable home.
Though structured similarly to Normal People—following two protagonists across multiple domestic and campus settings—Mother Ocean Father Nation feels fresher and distinct from what’s come to be the classic campus novel setup. While one protagonist struggles to even think of the future from her precarious exile on campus in California, Batsha creates his own kind of campus for the other in what’s left of the siblings’ hometown. In Batsha’s bildungsroman, multigenerational family narratives, political strife, and cultural otherness all take the spotlight to complicate two siblings’ simultaneous, but disparate, comings of age.
My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell (William Morrow, 2020)
In 2000, Vanessa Wye is 15 and a precocious, talented writer when she catches the eye of Jacob Strane, a 42-year-old English teacher at her elite boarding school. In 2017, she’s 32 and adrift, but steadfast in her belief that her past relationship with Strane was an epic, consensual love story. Then another former student publicly accuses Strane of grooming and sexual abuse, and Vanessa is left to reckon with the stories she was told about her great love, and the ones she’s told herself.
Written at the height of the #MeToo movement, My Dark Vanessa weaves together dueling narrative to tell the story of one woman in two eras—her first coming of age corrupted, her second, delayed. Russell’s debut novel is more harrowing and (aptly) darker than most other entries on this list, and tells its story with the kind of overwhelming intimacy and haunted nostalgia that only the strongest coming of age stories manage to balance.
All’s Well by Mona Awad (Simon & Schuster, 2020)
Recently, I’ve enjoyed campus novels that flip the traditional format by focusing not on a student, but a professor, albeit, one whose life is in just as much (if not greater) disarray. There’s Kiley Reid’s Come & Get It, in which a young, recently-divorced adjunct professor finds herself wrapped up in a student scandal, or Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir, in which a beloved middle-aged English professor becomes obsessed with a younger visiting lecturer after her own husband is exposed for misconduct. But, as is so often true in contemporary lit fic, no one is doing it like Mona Awad. In All’s Well, drama professor Miranda Fitch suffers from debilitating chronic pain and struggles to retain the respect of her students, who stand ready to mutiny after Miranda selects Shakespeare’s obscure problem play—the titular All’s Well That Ends Well—as their spring production. Then, a chance encounter with three mysterious figures grants her a new lease on life—one that may have devastating side effects for those around her.
My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Alpert Florin (Henry Holt and Co., 2022)
In 1998, Isabel Rosen is beginning her senior year at Wilder, a secluded liberal arts college in New England when an experience with sexual assault turns her world on its head. Attempting to bury the trauma, Isabel throws herself into her academics, carefully avoiding any mention of life after graduation. But in the world around her, the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal challenges how people think about sex and power, and on a smaller scale, a scandal among Wilder’s English faculty leads to the arrival of R.H. Connelly, once a rising star in the poetry world, now a middle-aged professor who becomes fascinated by Isabel when she enrolls in his class. As the pair’s relationship deepens, Isabel once again finds her sense of self upturned.
My Last Innocent Year is everything you want a campus novel to be. Like Tartt before her, Florin pulls inspiration from her own college experience to reckon not just with her own coming of age, but with what “coming of age” means in the isolated bubble of their time and place.
Bunny by Mona Awad (Viking, 2019)
Entering her final year of an exclusive MFA program, Samantha Mackie feels like more of an outcast than ever. Barring her cynical best friend, Ava, there’s no one—from her frosty professors to her cliquey classmates, nicknamed the Bunnies—who seems to understand Samantha or her unsettling short stories. Then, Samantha receives a mysterious invitation to join the Bunnies for a “literary salon,” but what she finds there is stranger than even her fiction.
I’ll keep it brief, since I’ve already written about this one at length, but suffice to say that in Bunny, Awad’s absurd, tragicomic brand of horror flips the campus novel on its head, creating a campus where academia breeds more than one kind of monster.
You Know How I’m Going to End This:
Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson (Penguin Classics, 1951/2013)
At a secluded women’s college in small-town Vermont, Natalie Waite, a precocious 17-year-old writer, is beginning her freshman year. Finally out of her overbearing father’s purview, Natalie struggles to form her own personality and connect with her classmates. Then, a rebellious, enigmatic student sets her sights on Natalie, and the boundary between real and imagined grows ever blurrier.
How else would I have ended this list? For experiencing the surreal in the woods around Bennington College we are, and to experiencing the surreal in the woods around Bennington College we shall return. Like Tartt after her, Jackson imagines the college campus (the same college campus) as a ground not just for inner transformation, but for a manipulation of reality itself. Jackson’s version of the college era is growing up at its most haunting—but also its most hopeful. If The Secret History is your introduction to the campus novel, there’s perhaps no culmination more fitting.
Honorable Mentions:
Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez (Macmillan, 2024)
Vladimir by Julia May Jonas (Simon & Schuster, 2022)
Mrs. S by K Patrick (Europa Editions, 2023)
The Adult by Bronwyn Fischer (Algonquin Books, 2023)
Currently Reading: Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly (Simon & Schuster, 2024)
Next Up:
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (Chapman and Hall, 1945)
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011)
The Secret Place by Tana French (Viking Penguin, 2014)
Babel by R.F. Kuang (Harper Voyager, 2022)
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Collage by the author.