With its Ivory Tower exclusivity and self-important populace, academia --- like the political arena or the Hollywood scene --- lends itself perfectly to satire. Few authors are as intent on evidencing the veracity of this claim as James Hynes. THE LECTURER'S TALE marks his second foray into the bizarre and hilarious world of academic mismanners (PUBLISH AND PERISH being his first). This time around, English professors at a fictitious Midwestern University comprise Hynes's cast of unsuspecting fools. A motley crew as far as critical ideologies and pretensions go, the professors do, however, share a common thread: they all go to absurd lengths for the sake of promotion, fame, power, and the respect of their colleagues. A withering and erudite dark comedy, THE LECTURER'S TALE will do doubt become a favorite among disgruntled students at universities far and wide.

Nelson Humboldt is a visiting adjunct lecturer (higher education jargon for a post-graduate bottom feeder with no hope of tenure) in the English Department at Midwestern; that is, until he's summarily dismissed from his job. Moments after his unceremonious firing, Nelson is involved in a freak bicycle accident and gets his index finger chopped off. The finger is reattached, but when the bandages come off, he discovers he now possesses a special power --- like a psychological Midas, Nelson can make people do as he says by simply touching them with the dead appendage. It is not long before Nelson is found "convincing" the housing coordinator to extend his housing eligibility and the Department's undergraduate chair to give him his old job back.

The latter half of Hynes's tale takes on a dark, distinctively Faustian feel. Now thoroughly drunk on his newfound power, Nelson sets his sights on the one thing every second-rate lecturer hopes against hope and secretly prays for at night…tenure. In a matter of weeks, he goes from teaching undergraduate composition classes (a humiliation like no other) to being eagerly sought after by the humanists, for whom "we must preserve the cultural tradition from Plato to Norman Mailer" is a mantra, and the cultural theorists, those young and hip new critics who publish papers with titles like "The Lesbian Phallus of Dorian Gray." The Department, the University, indeed the entire canon of Critical Theory is finally Nelson's for the taking.

While Hynes's plot contains sufficient twisting and turning to carry the reader along fairly smoothly, it's his brilliantly realized assembly of theory obsessed, acid-tongued literati that make THE LECTURER'S TALE such a wickedly funny and dead on parody. From the terrifying and militant Victoria Victorinix who, "after twenty-five years of ostracism, and worse, because of her sexual preference, had outlasted the genteel bigotry of deans, chairmen, and senior colleagues to end up as a full tenured professor," to Marko Kraljevic "the short, dark, thick-set Serb, lycanthropically hirsute, with a single black eyebrow…who referred to himself as an intellectual samurai, the Toshiro Mifune of cultural studies, claiming nothing and everything as his specialty," to the Canadian Lady Novelist who was "reputed to be like Margaret Atwood, only nicer," Hynes perfectly captures the eccentricity of academia and the posturing that typifies it: name-dropping, spontaneous passage recitations, bombastic pontifications, endlessly circuitous semantic debates, and political correctness.

This is not to suggest that Hynes's objective is merely to reduce his characters to an amalgamation of self-absorbed idiosyncrasies --- his wit is far too piercing, his character analysis far too insightful for that. Rather, Hynes is offering a serious critique of culturally based approaches to critical theory, a movement that has become very en vogue in the study of literature. The question/criticism at the heart of THE LECTURER'S TALE is really: Why must we endlessly reinterpret, deconstruct, and otherwise adulterate texts in a transparent attempt to feed contemporary intellectual society's obsession with sexual/textual politics? That Hynes, and the more staunch professors at Midwestern, refuse to take seriously the recent spate of literature with laughable titles like "I Gang Bang the Canon, which featured fantasies of sex with famous canonical authors" is humorously appreciated. What is not appreciated, however, is (1) the assumption that critical approaches grounded in cultural theory are trash, and (2) that the authors of said criticism are all hyper-sexualized women and/or militant lesbian femi-nazis. Indeed, the biggest weakness in Hynes's work is the extent to which he blames popular culturalists for the downfall of critical theory, while sympathizing with the poor, white, male traditionalists. His point may be partially valid, but for his argument to be as convincing as his comic portrayals, it needs to be a little less one-sided."

THE LECTURER'S TALE is high-brow comedy, and therefore not for everyone. This is certainly not a criticism, but rather a simple caveat for readers. If you don't/won't/can't see the humor behind the English department's shameless wooing of jennifer manly (intentionally spelled lower case, a la bell hooks), whose latest book on O. J. Simpson was "a bricolage of Judith Butler, Frantz Fanon, and Court TV [in which] she proved that Mark Furhman had planted the Bloody Glove as an act of repressed longing for O. J." --- THE LECTURER'S TALE may leave you feeling hopelessly befuddled.

W. H. Auden once said, "The goal of Satire is to reform, the Goal of Comedy acceptance." Certainly, there are elements to this book that some would find unacceptable (like, say, cultural theorists or people indifferent to the fact that there even exists a movement called cultural theory). And by the same token, there is an underlying call for change in THE LECTURER'S TALE, likely propelled by Hynes's deeply felt intellectual/moral/political outrage. ( Remember the Students! and Let My Old-School White Intellectuals Go! would be great battle cries for Hynes as he rallies his troops for reformation.) Ultimately, though, there exists a fundamental problem with satire: the subjects being parodied, whether they be academics or politicians, are among the least likely to ever change their ways. Having recognized many of my own professor's in THE LECTURER'S TALE, I found the idea of them pausing for a moment of introspection an endless source of amusement.