The Material: A Novel
Novels about academia almost always veer toward satire (see Richard Russo’s Straight Man, Jane Smiley’s Moo, or Zadie Smith’s On Beauty) because the egos, trappings, and the machinations of academia are inherently ridiculous. Camille Bordas offers her take on the university-based novel with The Material, which takes place over the course of one day near the end of the first semester in a fictional Stand-Up Comedy MFA program set in an unnamed Chicago university.
The MFA faculty consist of Kruger, who has parlayed his vanilla okay-ness into small-time movie stardom; Dorothy Michaels, who has spent most of her career as the only woman in the room (or in the comedy club); and Ashbee, who has spent most of his career as the only Black comedian in the room.
The students in the program are your expected mixed bag. There’s Artie, whose latest bit is based on his being too good-looking for comedy. Phil, who is so committed to allyship and inoffensiveness that he’s less of a colleague and more of a mascot. Olivia, who is focused on success and exorcising the ghosts of past trauma, rounded out by a few others.
This singular day includes a workshop (where Artie doesn’t even get to perform his latest bit because Kruger stops him, saying “Don’t tell the audience something they already noticed.”) and an evening comedy thrown down with students from Second City. The entire program is eagerly awaiting the arrival of Manny Reinhardt, who is scheduled to be a visiting professor second semester. Manny brings with him the biggest name the program has hired as well as some questionable private behavior (breaking a younger comedian’s nose and serially sleeping with and proposing to women he has no intention of marrying (or sleeping with again).
All of this seems like it should be rife for laughs, and yet it isn’t. Fiction, film, and television featuring stand-up comedy never feature funny stand-up comedy bits, even if every other line is a doozy (see The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel). These are characters who can’t get out of their own way. Their inner musings and observations are funnier than anything they come up with onstage, but even these fizzle out. The day culminates in the throw down with the Second City improv students. The arrival of Manny Reinhardt is oddly secondary because none of the characters are aware that he’s going to that day, which takes away some of the urgency of the single-day format.
Faculty meetings are the backbone of academic satire, and we get one here, but the jokes are predictable and fall a little flat: “The room was filling up, a particularly well-attended faculty meeting, Ashbee noted. He remember that pre-winter break meetings tended to be, because of the cookies. The Victorianists always made cookies before Christmas.
“The Stand-Up MFA was attached to the English Department, which many English professors resented (comedians belonged in Performing Arts, if they belonger anywhere at all in academia, was the thought), but the resentment was civil. Ashbee liked that about academics, that it never went beyond whispers in the hallways, or petitions no one read.”
This is an ensemble novel. There are sections written solely from individual points of view, but much of the action takes place in the crowded rooms of faculty meetings, MFA workshops, and comedy clubs. Bordas’ narrative facilely switches point of view within scenes, like a camera panning the room, taking in multiple reactions and secret thoughts. Even with the extended sections written from a singular point of view, the constant head-hopping makes it difficult to connect with the characters in a meaningful way.
The Material is amusing but not necessarily funny. It’s as though Bordas wants to be all things to all people—a satirical academic novel but also a novel about loneliness and self-doubt and also a ticking time bomb, all-in-a-day novel. Bordas is at her best in the scenes from a singular sustained point of view. Ultimately the satire isn’t broad enough and the ticking time bomb doesn’t feel urgent enough to hold the reader’s interest.