Carrying On

by Stewart Tolnay

CARRYING ON chronicles the trials and triumphs of Professor Lucas Brodie during a turbulent one-year period in his life. The story begins in November of 2016, shortly after Brodie’s wife, Marie, announces that their marriage is no longer working for her. Living on his own for the first time in more than twenty years, Lucas struggles to reconstruct his personal life against the headwind of his chronically neurotic personality. The professional side of Lucas’s life presents a different set of challenges. Lucas is chosen by his colleagues at Rainier University in Seattle to serve as the next chair of the Sociology Department. He accepts the Dean’s invitation to lead his department, despite his deep misgivings about the emotional toll it will take on him and the professional sacrifices it will require. His difficult decision is motivated by the competing candidacy of his nemesis in the department for the position. Lamenting the situation, and the decision he faces, Lucas tells his closest confidante that he will be “crucified on the cross of departmental desperation.” Professor Jade Singleton is a charismatic and ambitious feminist. Her transparent desire to be department chair rattles and concerns Lucas and many others in the department. Among her detractors, she is viewed as narcissistic, biased, and incompetent. Falling one vote short of achieving her goal, Jade launches an effort to undermine Lucas’s leadership. More favorable developments in Lucas’s personal life help him to weather the difficulties he faces at work. He adopts a dog, Gusto, and hires Anna Able a professional dog trainer. Gusto offers Lucas companionship. Anna proves to be a wise counselor and eventually a romantic partner. This tale about one year in Brodie’s life is sometimes humorous, sometimes sad, and sometimes pathetic, but always irreverent. It is a story of personal triumph over adversity, essentially through a strategy of “carrying on”. Although set in the academy, the story told in Carrying On is not unique to academia.

305 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 25, 2020

Reviews

[Stephen A. Matthews · Rating 5 out of 5]

Academic Tales

This novel focuses on a year in the personal and professional life of a new department chair at a Seattle-based university. The events, all challenging in one way or another, come thick and fast. And all are believable. Similarly, the main characters, while somewhat stereotyped, are all equally believable. This is an accurate reflection of academia at its best and worst from an author with a distinguished career in academia. So expect to find reference to academic hierarchies, power-relations, bias, professional misconduct, problematic faculty (including those out for personal gain rather than service to teaching/instruction and the needs of their department), personality clashes and interpersonal relations, jealousy, innuendo, lies (big and small), etc. It’s all (almost all) here. There was some, but relatively brief, mention of the rewards of teaching and interacting with undergraduate students, of research and service, and the benefits of constructive dialogue at all levels of the profession. Importantly, this was also about personal lives outside of work/Ivory tower. Many aspects of life on this side of the novel were very well done too. “Carrying on” through all the noise created by “work” depends very much on the relative level of noise on the “personal” (life) side. The potential chaos of both sides allows one to better appreciate the relative calm that can result when one side is or is becoming less stressful/predictable/balanced. Concurrently, this personal side of the story enabled the author write what is basically a love letter to Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. I loved this and for me an added bonus; and, as a result I now want to vacation in the area a sample some places I have never explored.

As an aside, I wanted to know more about the game theorist - but perhaps keeping them hidden was just a simple in-joke.

[Xi'an · Rating 2 out of 5]

The story centres in a successful sociology senior professor in an imaginary university in Seattle (which also appears in the 1996 Sentinel), who finds himself arm-bent into becoming the new HoD and the subsequent difficulties he faces against some contrarian colleague. While this should obviously appeal to me, and despite the novel being written by a former faculty at Uboub, the scenario quickly plummets down to unimaginable depths of boredom and suspension of belief. The main character is transparent, with a whining tendency and a personality as solid as a sodden marshmallow, and the other ones are almost uniformly caricatures as perfect representatives of minorities. Without getting into spoiling details, the main antagonist to this unlikely HoD accumulates all qualities a colleague should not possess, with an unrealistic ability to cross most of the department. Research seems unimportant, except when applying for an NSF grant or when attending a conference where the future HoD behaves in a most unethical way imho. Add to this an endless accumulation of details about a new dog acquired by the HoD to recover from a divorce (!) and the collection of all the menus enjoyed by the HoD, and there is no compelling reason to carry on.