Top 100 Cool Novels, #94, Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell
by Ernie on 04/12/07 at 11:12 am
Top 100 Cool Novels #94 is Pictures from an Institution, Randall Jarrell (1954). Although his greatest achievement was his precise and humane literary criticism, followed only by his intense war poems, Jarrell also took the time to write a single satirical novel about campus life. It is set in the years of exciting and exasperating transformations that occurred in the halls of American higher learning after the Second World War (in this regard, it may be compared with another masterpiece of its kind, Kingsley Amis’s Lord Jim, also 1954). Although essentially plotless, the novel is a very effective sequence of short, parodic episodes that skewer a variety of academic types. The most famous of these is Jarrell’s lampoon of the ferociously difficult novelist Mary McCarthy in the character of Gertrude Johnson. In an essay on Jarrell written up on that author’s death, Robert Lowell remarked that many of his friends kept it nearby to dip into whenever they needed cheering up. How many novels can do that?
