School is all booked up

School is a unifying experience, one that almost everybody shares. Perhaps that’s why so much has been written about it, including the children’s books of Barbara Park and the novels of James Hilton and John Knowles. Still, of all the levels of education, higher learning is the most compelling, perhaps because it’s where we learn to be adults. Here, then, are 10 books, fiction and nonfiction, that look at colleges and graduate schools across the country from the perspective of both faculty and students, and in so doing, tell us something about the role of academia in our lives.

“The Blacker the Berry”

Wallace Thurman

Thurman was a figure of the Harlem Renaissance who grew up in Salt Lake City and attended USC before moving to New York. His debut novel, published in 1929, was among the first books to look at black-on-black racism, portraying a dark-skinned girl who is derided by her fairer family and friends. Although not an academic novel per se, it features an extended sequence detailing the experience of black students at USC during the early 1920s. Such a re-creation is significant not just as literature but also as social history -- evoking, as it does, an overlooked and largely unknown moment in Los Angeles life.

“Franny and Zooey”

J. D. Salinger

Like “The Blacker the Berry,” Salinger’s greatest book is also only tangentially about higher learning. It begins with 19-year-old Franny Glass having a breakdown during lunch with her boyfriend on a college football Saturday. But it is all about wisdom, intelligence and education in the broadest sense. Once Franny goes home to recuperate, she, her mother and her brother Zooey spend one of the most extravagantly detailed mornings in the history of literature, arguing, cajoling, consoling each other in an endless back and forth. Here, Zooey offers one of the great put-downs of undergraduate intellectuals, like the boy his sister was visiting when she fell apart. “Phooey,” he declares. “Phooey, I say, on all white-shoe college boys who edit their campus literary magazines. Give me an honest con man any day.”

“The Group”

Mary McCarthy

McCarthy’s 1963 novel follows eight members of the Vassar class of 1933 as they make their way in the world, post-graduation, and face the challenges of mid-century modern life. Here, too, academia is important as frame or context, the tie that binds these characters and makes them who they are. For McCarthy, Vassar is a symbol not just of learning but also of class and privilege, a port of entry, as it were. It’s a subtle point but an essential one, suggesting that the schools we go to are more important for the values they instill and the access they offer than for any classroom experience.

“The Human Stain”

Philip Roth

Set against the backdrop of Bill Clinton’s 1998 impeachment summer, this story of a professor at a small New England college looks at political correctness run amok. Although the novel purports to be about race and class and identity, Roth’s real subjects are, as always, hypocrisy and double standards, the bitterness and sanctimony that inform private and public life. For Coleman Silk, the book’s ill-fated protagonist, the quiet security of academia quickly becomes a minefield as a remark taken out of context leads to the unraveling of everything he has ever counted dear. In the process, Roth asks piercing questions about who we are and who we want to be, suggesting that the past is always with us, no matter how hard we try to set it aside.

“Lucky Jim”

Kingsley Amis

What would a list of academic novels be without “Lucky Jim”? First published in 1954, this comic masterpiece is the book that put Amis on the map. The story of a reluctant lecturer at a second-line British university, it exposes the hypocrisies of teaching as a profession, including disinterested students, disinterested teachers and the political intrigues on which so many careers depend. After it was published, Amis was classified as one of the “angry young men” of English literature, but that’s not really accurate; for all its rage and piercing cynicism, “Lucky Jim” has an absurdist edge.

“Moving On”

Larry McMurtry

In the 1960s and early ‘70s, McMurtry wrote a series of novels that framed urban Houston as a contemporary version of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, evoking the interlocking lives of two friends, Patsy Carpenter and Emma Horton, and the members of their families. “Moving On” is Patsy’s story, but a significant subplot belongs to Emma and her graduate student husband Flap. For McMurtry, there’s a lot of romance in their threadbare, book-lined existence, where the only currency worth having is the currency of ideas.

“One L”

Scott Turow

A decade before Turow published his blockbuster novel “Presumed Innocent,” he wrote this memoir about his first year at Harvard Law School. Smart, concise and carefully considered, it is a compelling account of legal education from the inside. Turow explores the experience of a new law student, calling it a time of “trial and initiation,” much like a ballplayer’s rookie season. Even more important, he evokes the personalities -- himself, his classmates, his professors -- while deftly charting the dramatic arc of the school year.

“Two Schools of Thought”

Carolyn See and John Espey

Subtitled “Some Tales of Learning and Romance,” this slender volume is like a suite of love letters by two writers besotted by literature and life. See and Espey, who spent 26 years as a couple, each contribute a cluster of essays about their graduate school experiences -- his as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and hers as a doctoral candidate at UCLA. Off the cuff, informal and discursive, these pieces resonate like conversation, confessional and erudite at once. Originally published in 1991, the book has a different resonance in the aftermath of Espey’s death in 2000, but at heart it remains a testament to learning and the exhilarating pleasures of the mind.

“White Noise”

Don DeLillo

DeLillo’s eighth novel -- generally regarded as his funniest and most accessible -- revolves around a professor named Jack Gladney, who teaches Hitler studies at a college in the heart of America. That’s a deliriously ironic set-up, and as the book progresses, DeLillo uses it for all it’s worth, detailing the hideous flatness of our consumer society, in which all ideas have equal value in the marketplace and everything blurs beneath an endless onslaught of brand names and advertising come-ons. Only in the face of impending crisis (an “airborne toxic event”) does this eternal present tense collapse on itself, revealing a collective underpinning of fear. As for university life, it is just another distraction.

“Wonder Boys”

Michael Chabon

Chabon’s second novel tells the story of Grady Tripp, a burned-out writer who teaches at a college in Pittsburgh while struggling with a 2,000-plus-page novel that he can’t complete. It’s a situation rife with comic possibilities, and as his story unfolds -- entirely within the span of the school’s writers weekend -- Grady’s life slips increasingly out of control. For Chabon, academia is a writer’s graveyard, where the price of security is the edge required to produce great art. In this wicked satire, he traces Grady’s er, degradation, in which he must literally lose everything before he recognizes what he’s got.

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California writers

The state’s colleges have influenced a number of well-known writers. A brief sampling:

Raymond Carver

The novelist graduated from Cal State Humboldt in 1963. He also attended Cal State Chico.

Michael Chabon

The novelist graduated from UC Irvine in 1987.

Jack London

The novelist attended UC Berkeley in the 1890s.

Harriet Doerr

The novelist attended Stanford in the late 1920s.

Luis Valdez

The playwright went to San Jose State in early 1960s.

Terry McMillan

The novelist is a 1979 graduate of UC Berkeley.