Red Wheeler, a seventh-year trust-fund pothead and leader of the progressive student alliance, stages a protest of Russell’s class due to the professor’s inclusion of Huckleberry Finn, a book that one student progressive notices, as if for the first time, has “the ‘N-word’ all over it.” Another adds, helpfully, “Seriously, bro.

But keeping your head down won’t save you, and Russell is soon beset. So Russell tries to keep his head down and just teach Twain. He agrees with a lot of what the campus activists are saying, sure, but their methods - they seem a bit much. Hailing from the South, Eph Russell, up for tenure at Devon, wants very much to join this East Coast world of high learning and culture, though he does have his reservations. The novel amounts not so much to a satire as to a kind of anti-PC morality tale. Worst of all, for a satirist taking on the great American topic of college life, Johnston, like Wolfe, is just not very funny. Johnston’s book inherits all these qualities. But Johnston does owe him: Campusland is in many ways an update of Wolfe’s 2004 novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, a satire of campus life that was, at once, creepy and cruel enough to tank Wolfe’s career, or to prove it had already sunk. Saying Wolfe’s name in the same breath as Twain’s is perhaps giving him too high a compliment. At the time, this was the equivalent of a literary earthquake, and we can follow the technique’s lineage through the Realists right to Hemingway and all the way to modern writers like Tom Wolfe. Used the language of nineteenth-century rural America, some of it quite colorful, and some of it even offensive, at least to the modern ear. The students there are “earnest” and “likable” by comparison with the Ivy League, there is “less entitlement, and no one” - blessedly - “was confused about what pronouns or which bathrooms to use.” In other words, this is a place where real learning can happen, and where Eph can educate his students about the realist tradition in American literature, beginning with Mark Twain, whose characters, Russell explains to a group of well-mannered students, In the meantime, Russell has taken a part-time teaching job at a university in Alabama.

The main character, Eph Russell, a middling, well-meaning English professor, has taken a year-long leave of absence from Devon University (a fictionalized Yale), where he was falsely accused of sexual assault by a freshman, put through a bogus Title IX trial, and watched as his beloved Huckleberry Finn was trashed by campus social justice warriors in a staged protest. It does not arrive until the very end, and it goes like this.

FROM THE BEGINNING of Scott Johnston’s new novel, Campusland, we know that a mention of Tom Wolfe is forthcoming.

Campusland novel