The Student Body: Short Stories About College Students and Professors
by Vicki Urquhart
If ever a book cover belied its contents The Student Body: Short Stories About College Students and Professors does. Don’ t be put off by the title and the unfortunate choice of headless torsos used as cover art. Beyond these obstacles is a collection of funny, sad, sardonic, self-effacing, and tender tales. The characters are recognizable, the settings are familiar, and the situations are believable.
It is evident that editor John McNally, assistant professor of English at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, carefully selected and skillfully juxtaposed these narratives. Opening with Richard Russo’s “The Whore’ s Child,” McNally offers a story of a dour old nun who buffets every attempt by the instructor to shape her writing. She has already lived her life and has no interest in creating a fiction; rather, she joins the class to record both memoir and lesson.
Alternately, in the second story, a young man and woman are just beginning their adult lives. In Amy Knox Brown’s “Strip Battleship,” their youthful sexual explorations seem innocent and light compared to the nun’s life of sadness and adversity. Her story is at an end, while theirs is just beginning, and they have much to learn about life, love, and loyalty.
McNally strengthens the collection by including selections from well-established writers as well as newcomers. His division of the book into two sections, either student or faculty, is simplistic, but it does impose order on the seventeen different stories.
Nonetheless, these narratives are really just about people–neither students nor faculty in particular, and many are equally stories of students and faculty.
I confess to having found the stories about students infinitely more interesting, and the stories about faculty far too predictable. Among the student stories, for instance, are the strident tones of Rebecca Lee’s “The Banks of the Vistula,” reflecting the broader campus milieu of youthful political convictions. And it is into the student stories that McNally surprisingly interjects Stephen King’s “Strawberry Spring,” a teasing tale that raises more questions about the narrator’s guilt or innocence then it answers. An obsessed student’s infatuation with his professor also has a clever twist in Joe Schraufnagel’s “Like Whiskey for Christmas.”
The faculty stories effuse adults who suffer from ill-formed and unsatisfying relationships. Ron Carlson’s “Hartwell,” for instance, introduces a self-deluded, lonely, aging professor headed for hurt and humiliation because of his infatuation with a student. In “Professors” by Tom Whalen, the greatest challenge for one female student apparently has nothing to do with academics and everything to do with staying out of the clutches of more than one of her depraved professors. More stories of sad divorcees, confused wives, and men and women desperate for love follow, and why wouldn’ t they? A college campus is as good a lens as any under which to scrutinize relationships.
These faculty stories are painful reminders that a life in academe can be as personally limiting as it is intellectually freeing.
McNally includes brief biographical information about the authors at the end of the collection. This is a nice touch, and readers can quickly glance through it. Creative writing instructors will want to read this collection for themselves, and then use it in their writing classes.
Ultimately, this anthology is best summed up in the words of
an unnamed student in the first story’s creative writing class who listens to what the nun has written and says, “I really liked this story. It feels real.”
