Tom Whalen

The President in Her Tower attempts to be both an experimental novel set in a mysterious university and a satirization of bureaucracy in academia. Of the two goals the first is accomplished (albeit the result is nothing special) but the second target was missed except for those with very specific life experiences.

The great authors who deal in surreal fiction rarely, if ever, deal in weird for the sake of weird. Kafka, Borges, Calvino, Buzzati, Perutz all have strangeness in their writing, but it always exists for a purpose. It is the decidedly second tier authors that pile on the randomness without apparent purpose beyond padding out the story. David Ohle, Shane Jones, and Michael Cisco all do this (though the latter has his moments), and the result is chunks of text that make your eyes glaze over, since the content is nonsense both in the real world and in the context of the story. Tom Whalen belongs to this second-tier of surreal writers, who sprinkles his pages with tidbits like February 22nd is "the birthday of the idea from which sprung this institution's conception from the mind of a dark traveller when he glimpsed moonlight in a mountain pool beneath him as he crossed the Hugo Mountain." Does this tidbit ever return for any importance to the story? No. Does it somehow enhance the themes of the novel? No. It just exists to communicate that the university is a mysterious place- something established ad nauseam earlier in the novel. If you were to go through this novel and cross out every superfluous instance where Whalen drops in a passage showing you how bizarre the university, or the President, or the other deans are you'd lose a quarter of the novel. The result isn't terrible, it just causes this short novel to drag and leaves you feeling as though you've wasted time by reading every stroke of strangeness layered on.

As a satire of academic bureaucracy I didn't think this book worked, but to be fair I might not be in the target audience. I've never worked on the administration side of a university. I have however attended university, then graduate school, and then another graduate school, so I have experience in that world. I've also worked four different government jobs at various levels, meaning I've had my fair share of dealing with bureaucracy as well. Despite this experience the satirical aspect of this novel never struck home for me. It's certainly doable to have a surreal situation that nevertheless communicates the bizarre and frustrating ways that real-world institutions operate- we've all read Kafka- but Whalen's world of an all-powerful and possibly supernatural university President and the strange projects she directs, alongside a host of deans all plotting her downfall, never spoke to me about working in that field, much less the nature of power and institutions generally. If you have to have experience specifically with the field of academic administration to get something out of this satire I submit the book has failed as a satirical work. The more specific, the more universal after all- the satire in this work is not general enough for anyone to understand, and it isn't specific enough to feel universal.

Overall give this a try if you have worked in academic administration and you're in the mood for a work of experimental fiction of the "weird for the sake of weird" variety. If you only meet the latter requirement then you're better off reading some of the Calvino you haven't read yet, or trying out some Buzzati. As someone who doesn't much care for weird for the sake of weird and who hasn't worked for the narrow sliver of society this satire works for I found it to be a flop.… (mais)