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A Professorial Pyth
Location - Hawaii. Topic - universities. Genre - literary satire. Theme (universal) - How we deal with dilemmas when we leave comfort zones. Plot - An "egg-headed" Professor takes an administrative job at an eclectic Hawaiian University and blunders his way through university problems (sexual harassment), role of athletics, etc.). How does he deal with problem of "beautiful island" and impossible job for him? Read the book - full of subtle humor.
208 pages, Paperback
First published October 5, 2005
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June 3, 2019
A story of a professor taking a trip to Hawaii and getting talked into staying on as department head. I learned of this book after becoming almost uncritically enamored of the writer's poetry, uncollected in chapbooks but available online. Unfortunately, this book is so baffingly written as to make me rethink any admiration I had for the work of the author, a professor emeritus at the University of Arkansas. The book, billing itself as original, satirical, and provocative, has some laughably (calculatedly???) amateurish passages to convey plot and setting, like this excerpt from the very first page:
"See Kathy," I said. "I told you that hills covered the Island."
Kathy wiped her eyes and gaped out the small airplane window. "You're right," she said. "Hawaii's more than beaches."
I pressed my nose against the same window. "The Island also carries deep valleys between mountain ridges, I said."
"Look, I see Diamond Head," Kathy said. "We made it."
"Thanks to our friend whose house we've rented," I replied. "We'll use it all summer on our first trip here."
This might read as satire of poor exposition if at any point during the rest of the book the reader were assured that there were a reliable hand at the tiller. Nearly every single time the protagonist steps outside, a reference is made to trade winds. It happens so unfailingly that it evolves from noticeable to droll to bizarre. We could give the author a very generous benefit of the doubt and say that these constant prevailing winds are very tenuously symbolic of Haole change or the resistance to it or something and not just a thoughtless and conspicuous redundancy.
The department that the Professor takes over is never specified, ostensibly to lend the story more of an allegorical feel as hinted at by the increasingly pretentious book title, but this quickly becomes an awkward conceit to maintain when characters narrowly avoid discussing exactly what it is they teach or do.
The book also very deliberately gives almost no explicit inner life to any of the characters. There is extremely limited inner monologue. The descriptions of expressions, microexpressions, gestures and other physical behavior is often so abrupt or incomplete that it's almost worse than not having any context for the dialogue at all. It makes the book feel like somebody somehow wrote a play, stage directions and all, in first-person. At the end of the book there are thirty-one discussion questions where the reader is encouraged to extrapolate just exactly what went on. Hopefully a Fayetteville English class is able to discover something.
"See Kathy," I said. "I told you that hills covered the Island."
Kathy wiped her eyes and gaped out the small airplane window. "You're right," she said. "Hawaii's more than beaches."
I pressed my nose against the same window. "The Island also carries deep valleys between mountain ridges, I said."
"Look, I see Diamond Head," Kathy said. "We made it."
"Thanks to our friend whose house we've rented," I replied. "We'll use it all summer on our first trip here."
This might read as satire of poor exposition if at any point during the rest of the book the reader were assured that there were a reliable hand at the tiller. Nearly every single time the protagonist steps outside, a reference is made to trade winds. It happens so unfailingly that it evolves from noticeable to droll to bizarre. We could give the author a very generous benefit of the doubt and say that these constant prevailing winds are very tenuously symbolic of Haole change or the resistance to it or something and not just a thoughtless and conspicuous redundancy.
The department that the Professor takes over is never specified, ostensibly to lend the story more of an allegorical feel as hinted at by the increasingly pretentious book title, but this quickly becomes an awkward conceit to maintain when characters narrowly avoid discussing exactly what it is they teach or do.
The book also very deliberately gives almost no explicit inner life to any of the characters. There is extremely limited inner monologue. The descriptions of expressions, microexpressions, gestures and other physical behavior is often so abrupt or incomplete that it's almost worse than not having any context for the dialogue at all. It makes the book feel like somebody somehow wrote a play, stage directions and all, in first-person. At the end of the book there are thirty-one discussion questions where the reader is encouraged to extrapolate just exactly what went on. Hopefully a Fayetteville English class is able to discover something.
Displaying 1 of 1 review