A 'Love Story' That Failed

Not so long ago classics scholar Erich Segal was forced to leave Yale after he published Love Story, a bestseller about a love affair between two Harvard students. At the time, it was argued that it was not appropriate for a scholar to write popular fiction, or even to be familiar with it.

Arts and Sciences

By Thomas Mallon

Ticknor & Fields, $ 16.95

But academic pressure has not stopped scholars from leading a double life, scholar by day and novelist by night. Now Thomas Mallon has returned to the scene of Segal's crime, Arts and Sciences, his first fictional work, tells the story of a young man's passage into adulthood in Cambridge, Mass.

It's the early 1970s, and Artie Dunne has just arrived at Harvard's graduate school from Brown. Artie is a puny boy from Long Island. He comes to Cambridge with the expectation that he will spend his time immersed in academics.

But Artie finds the Harvard experience is somewhat different from what he anticipated. His companions at the graduate dormitory "Comus Hall" are hardly your typical students. Comus houses Voltears, a graduate student in French literature who suffers from a sort of agoraphobia, a gay man ("the Gainsborough boy") and his weekend roomate nicknamed Pithecanthropus, and a host of other eccentrics.

At the novel's start, Artie's only friend is Shane, a hippie-druggie from Brown. But he is unreliable, floating in and out of Artie's life unpredictably.

So Artie is forced to find friends elsewhere. Enter Angela, a brilliant, British beauty who is a classmate of his. "Of the twelve men who this stuffy room fill,/Two I'd like to screw, three I'd like to kill," she tells him in the note that serves as the overture to the relationship. Unfortunately, the line is the best thing about the affairs, if not the novel. The rest of the novel is primarily occupied with the two's inability to cope with themselves and each other.

Mallon attempts to relieve the tedium of his stereotypical plot by creating exaggerated characters who often seem more ridiculous than humorous. Mallon's penchant for defying convention, if even in the most conventional of ways, is evident in his intentional mangling of the names of Harvard buildings. Sever Hall is reincarnated as Cleaver, and Warren House is transposed to Warble House.

Mallon delights in his disregard for the facts. In a disclaimer he writes, "Just as the people herein never existed, and the incidents described didn't happen, all sorts of Harvard rules, buldings and curricula, along with other bits of reality, have been tampered with and rearranged in order to accommodate this novel's fictive whims and entirely harmless purpose."

That is not to say that Mallon's novel lacks pretension--it doesn't Mallon is an academic by profession and it shows. Few pages are without allusions. Art's love for Keats has earned him the nickname "Urn Man," and Mallon peppers his novel with frequent allusions to the romantic poet. The book starts with a description of Artie's Greek homework, later quoted, and the text has the requisite invocations of Matthew Arnold, Shakespeare and Joyce. Moreover, Mallon throws in details about contemporary political events, such as Pattie Hearst's kidnapping.

Although he may imitate the technique of better writers by using such allusions, here they seem out of place and forced. And his claim that the book is harmless and silly hardly conforms to the highbrow tone of the work, leaving his attempt at juggling knowledge of the literary with techniques of mass culture unsuccessful.

Which raises the question as to whether Mallon should be writing fiction at all. In Segal's case, his work made bestseller lists, whatever its literary merits. But Mallon will not achieve similar popularity. And though he should not be shamed out of academia for his fictional foray, he should consider whether he wants to taint his critical reputation by writing schlock.

With its caricatured characters, the relentless chronicling of Artie an Angela's relationship--from inception to ride-off-in-the-sunset ending--Arts and Sciences is at best uninspired and only mildly amusing. And though it may quote Greek and allude to Keats, Mallon's novel remains a mainstream work. Let it float by.