By Helen E. Mundler-Arantes
In Charles Holdefer’s Don’t Look at Me, Holly Winegarten, a former college basketball star, breaks her leg and has to look for a new direction. Readers with little interest in sports may meet this scenario with a flicker of dismay, but Charles Holdefer’s novel quickly blossoms into a very witty and engaging contribution to the great tradition of campus novels.
Holly lapses uncomfortably into ordinary student life, taking a job in the library archives, where she stumbles across a collection of correspondence between Emily Dickinson and her Irish lover, and with it, an unpublished poem by Emily herself. When she encounters the demanding, but bumbling, Dr. Borden, an English professor spurned by his colleagues, she begins to hone her interest in Dickinson’s work, painstakingly rewriting an essay to meet his exacting standards for the “Fundamental Readings” course he offers. On the other side is the new scholarship, exemplified by Rosemary, the professor whose graduate seminars Holly eagerly attends and whose approval she longs for, and also by Philip Post, a slippery post-grad who is determined to climb the greasy pole of academia, even if it means prevaricating about his Cambridge career.
Thus the stage is set for the perfect campus novel, with departmental in-fighting, post-grad rivalry, and the library as the hub of the most important action. There is a cosiness about this genre: you either relive your own student days or else love the exoticism of a college town in Michigan. The tropes are initially as expected—the hapless student caught between rival academics, the parody of the lit-crit machine, the contrast between articles on “Spatio-Topological Text(s),” favored by the self-regarding Rosemary, and the emotional response to poetry exemplified by Holly. But Holdefer’s novel also subverts the genre of the campus novel, offering a twenty-first century twist, where the characters are aware that nobody outside academia cares a jot about what goes on inside. The very progression of the bildungsroman that has Holly as its heroine demonstrates this: for all she discovers an unpublished poem by Emily Dickinson, for all poetry changes her life, she finds that graduate school is simply not for her, and moves on. Life, it seems, is elsewhere.
At the same time—and this is one of the great strengths of Holdefer’s book—there is much more going on. Holly’s home life is just as important as her college experience. This is also a novel about family, not just as vague background to college life, but with its own involving particularities and peculiarities: Holly has a brother called Honus, named after a German baseball star; she has a dead mother, and lives with the uncanny horror of a stepmother who by coincidence bears the same first name. The way Art, Anita, Holly and Honus all ease into normal family life, in spite of this, is particularly well handled. A passage toward the end of the novel, where the children take control of the organization of a Thanksgiving meal while the parents bicker in the bedroom, testifies to the way in which everything has settled down, and the new Anita has become, quite simply, one of their parents. Meanwhile, Honus’s story, as he turns his high school band into an unlikely success, is given sufficient space to develop not just as a counterweight to Holly’s own progress but as a story in its own right, and his transformation from dumpy oddball to rising rock star is very absorbing.
While this is a well-constructed and eminently readable novel, it is at the same time breathtakingly audacious. The Emily Dickinson pastiche is stunningly well done, and recalls A. S. Byatt’s Booker-winning novel Possession. Holdefer’s point, that literature can change a life and that its power extends way outside of universities, both supports and contrasts with this virtuosity, highlighting the awareness of dwindling influence and relevance with which academics in the humanities are all too familiar. Holdefer, as an academic himself, make this point subtly and beautifully, although he also has fun along the way, parodying the posturing at the MLA Annual Convention and capturing the sterility of the race to publish.
Don’t Look at Me is also a novel of our times, with much to say about growing up today. It has an anti-bildungsroman aspect to it: things never come right for Holly; she is never turned out as a finished adult, like a plaster figure from a mold. Her trajectory is a series of false starts, of interruptions and compromises, in love as much as anything else, and it ends not with a triumphant launch into the world of adulthood and a promising career, but with a sort of coda to her student days: having applied for a job—any job, anywhere, through a website that offers no more than a way out—she finds herself not in France or Italy, countries she had hoped to spend time in, but living a sort of afterlife in a place attributed to her at random. Holly may have come of age, but she has no place in the world waiting for her. Life seems to be less a linear progression than a series of discrete, not necessarily logically-connected, stages. Holly may read Barbara Pym, where women lead structured, anchored lives, but she herself has no access to that world. Holdefer masters the art of the inconclusive conclusion, finishing the story, but leaving the reader with plenty to think about.
