The digital magazine AirMail recently ran a retrospective of the campus novel genre. The article regretfully concluded that the satirical gems of the 20th century — like Kingsley Amis’s “Lucky Jim,” probably the best known, and my own personal favorite — could not have been written in this day and age. “Modern campuses are already so dangerously close to parody that satire is either redundant or off limits,” the author explained. But then, he slyly added, perhaps all of this is conspiring to make it exactly the time for a renaissance.

“Trigger Warning,” by Robert Klose. Open Books, 203 pages. $17.95
I was reminded of this as I started to read Robert Klose’s latest novel. In “Trigger Warning,” he applies his acerbic wit to tilt against some very contemporary academic windmills. The book’s epigraph, a quote from Henry Kissinger, acts as its own trigger warning: “University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.” Klose himself is a professor — he teaches marine biology at the University of Maine — so one might say he knows whereof he writes. (He has also written half a dozen books and contributes regular essays to The Christian Science Monitor.)
Tymotheusz Tarnaszewski is a biology professor at Skowhegan College, located “in the heart of the North Maine Woods.” T, as he is universally known, is beloved by his students — they applaud at the end of each lecture — for his original teaching style and for his commitment to their success. As the new academic year gets underway, T is still mourning the recent death of his adored wife.
Trouble begins in another department where a colleague lecturing on statistics mentions a seemingly value-free piece of data: 63.5% of first-generation college students do not graduate. However, one of the professor’s students, a member of that cohort, applies this statistic directly to himself. He complains to the dean and accuses the professor of stealing his hope. The result, handed down by the administration, is trigger warnings all round: Students must be warned in advance of anything in a syllabus that might possibly cause them distress.
T refuses to comply and is soon up before the provost. One of his students has been upset by T’s statement that, biologically speaking, the single goal of all species, including humans, is to pass their genes on to the next generation. (His grounds for unhappiness are not what you might imagine.) Why had T not posted a trigger warning? demands the provost. In short order, T, although tenured, is terminated for insubordination.
As its title implies, the story’s backbone is the resulting struggle between faculty and administration, with T at the center. He finds a surprising defender in a bluff political science professor whom he had previously avoided for his confrontational ways. On top of campus politics, other threads crowd in, including various tangled love knots, snitches and even a bomb threat. Despite Klose’s satirical intent, his characters are more than ciphers, at least the “good guys” are. We care about them. As I noted in a review of his previous book, “Life on Mars,” (which also takes place on a college campus in Maine) he does not waste much subtlety on the bad guys.
In the end, the administration and its trigger warning ukase are taken down by — irony alert — a trigger warning (or lack thereof) itself. Common sense triumphs; the forces of darkness are expelled from their academic Eden, and love triumphs, or is very likely to.
My one complaint is that everything is resolved offstage and far too quickly, especially when the original drama “developed rather slowly like the opening of a flower,” as the author describes it himself. The denouement is reported secondhand by the rueful college president in a single paragraph. Dean and provost will be fired; for the president, “there will be boilerplate about wanting to spend more time with my family.” It would have been more fun to see the aforesaid forces of darkness get their comeuppances, blow by satirical blow.
“Trigger Warning” has some memorable turns of phrase. A woman walks away from T without “throwing him a glance to acknowledge that a pilot light of concern still flickered.” The desolation of a front yard is crowned by an unpruned crabapple tree “looking like a distressed mother looking for wayward children.” On the telephone, one of T’s enemies is able to “sustain a filibuster of execrations.”
Robert Klose’s new book is not as laugh-out-loud funny as “Life on Mars,” but he manages to poke some much-needed fun at contemporary academia in a thoroughly enjoyable way.
Thomas Urquhart is the author of “For the Beautyof the Earth,” and “Up for Grabs! Timber Pirates, Lumber Barons and the Battles Over Maine’s Public Lands.”
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