Jack Ludwig. Confusions (1965)

    Jack Ludwig. Confusions (1965) Stories about universities in the 60s trigger nostalgia. Some, like this one, catch the spirit of the times so well that one forgives their self-indulgence. The narrator, a Jewish boy from deepest Brooklyn, after earning a graduate degree and teaching assistant position at Harvard, ends up at a California liberal arts college that prides itself on both scholarship and laid-back teaching. The jockeying for status within the English Department is nicely drawn. A Grand Old Man of impeccable Southern ancestry lords it over the merely educated Mid-westerners, but the narrator’s wife, a Radcliffe grad, trumps his social status. A (respectable) hippy-type turns out to have even higher social status. And so on.
     The satire is sharp, several of the characters remind me of professors I have known, and the plot, such as it is, exposes the venality of a college administration that places possible donor dollars over safety, when the narrator discovers that one of his students is schizoid with a history of violence, and will no doubt go beyond silly practical jokes to real doing real damage.
     Reading the book briefly took me back to the time when I was a grad student, not footloose and fancy free, but still in that state when attention to the serious business of committing to a career seemed something that could be put off for a little while longer. Encyclopaedia Britannica indicates that the book got mixed reviews. I’m not surprised. It’s uneven, more a series of anecdotes than a structured novel, the narrator too often is a whinger, plot points are tossed out and left behind, and so on. But all the same, the book works. It’s a satire, and satires are by definition  mash-ups. Fun to read. Not an excellent book, but a very good one. Out of print, but worth the search for a 2nd hand copy.***