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by: Randall Jarrell
Binding: Unknown Binding
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Pages: 277
Publication Date: 1970
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Sales Rank: 5875178
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
'The father of the modern campus novel, and the wittiest of them all. Extraordinary to think that 'political correctness' was so deliciously dissected 50 years ago.'—Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph
'Move over Dorothy Parker. Pictures . . . is less a novel than a series of poisonous portraits, set pieces, and endlessly quotable put-downs. Read it less for plot than sharp satire, Jarrell's forte.'—Mary Welp
'I'm greatly impressed by the real fun, the incisive satire, the closeness of observation, and in the end by a kind of sympathy and human warmth. It's a remarkable book.'—Robert Penn Warren
Amazon.com:
Randall Jarrell's only novel features a Bryn Mawr-like women's college in which whispers and verbal shivs and sycophancy rule. 'Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Benton had been endowed with one to begin with, and had smiled and sweated and spoken for the other.' The institution's star-struck head is a Clintonesque young man particularly adept at raising money in Hollywood and who 'wanted you to like him, he wanted everybody to like him--it was part of being a president; but talking all the time was too.' Unfortunately, his new creative-writing hire only likes him the first time they meet. Thenceforth, she not only stirs things up but skewers them as well.
When the book was first published in 1954, most considered Gertrude Johnson to be a none-too-veiled portrait of Mary McCarthy. (The Partisan Review, for instance, failed to run a planned excerpt for fear of litigation.) 'As a writer Gertrude had one fault more radical than all the rest: she did not know--or rather, did not believe--what it was like to be a human being. She was one, intermittently, but while she wasn't she did not remember what it had felt like to be one; and her worse self distrusted her better too thoroughly to give it much share, ever, in what she said or wrote.' Pictures from an Institution is a superb series of poisonous portraits, set pieces, and endlessly quotable put-downs. One reads it less for plot than sharp satire, of which Jarrell is the master.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - The Supreme Academic Novel
Author Randall Jarrell's brilliantly witty, prophetic novel from the middle of the last century shows in their bud many of the absurd developments which have come to full flower in current American academe. Endless Tolerance, Creativity, and Diversity are already the buzzwords par excellence at fictional Benton College of the 1950's. Accordingly , Jarrell presents us with an art department whose members are so open minded (i.e. reluctant to judge between good and bad) that "if someone dipped a porcupine ... Read More
Rating: - Fall out of your chair, roaring funny!
I laughed out loud through the entire thing! People on the street would stop me and ask what was so funny. Randall Jarrell, a poet, and Mary McCarthy were on the Bard College campus at the same time in the '50's, when McCarthy was a writer in residence for a year. Jarrell shadows her cold-hearted fiction-gathering techniques, as she observes the Bard faculty in action(this is during the 1950's) for a book she wrote called The Groves of Academe. My piano teacher thought it was a mean-spirited view of McCarthy, ... Read More
Rating:  - Disappointing
I was determined to like this book and gave it my best shot, but found I couln't bring myself to finish it. Yes, it's witty, but it's also hopelessly dated. The fifties had come and gone long before I was born, so I confess that many of the cultural references went right over my head. If you are looking for a spoof on academia, you're better off reading David Lodge or Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim.
Rating:  - Locked in an Institution
The title tells you right away that this book will be very clever, but it should also alert you that it is a series of satiric set pieces rather than a fully-realised novel. The narrator, self-effacing and elusive, turns his gaze on administrators and faculty at fictional Benton College more or less in turn although a flimsy plot takes us through the term. Some of the characters, notably the music professor, attain full stature as literary creations but the main object of the narrator's attention, the woman novelist, ... Read More
Rating: - Really worth the read
Randall Jarrell's roman a clef about life in a small college, in that it centers upon a Mary McCarthyesque novelist who is herself embarking upon her own roman a clef (very much like THE GROVES OF ACADEME) about the "little people" who also trundle through the small college campus where she is allowed to stride magnificently like a contemptuous giantess. Thus the reader has the double pleasure of seeing her ironic views of the failings of the people around her contextualized by his or her ironic view of her own grosser ... Read More
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