Foolscap: Foolery in the English Department
Categories: Rediscoveries , Staff Picks , Fiction
If you’re lucky enough to be on summer break, spend a few hours with Michael Malone’s inspired satire of academia and the literary scene, Foolscap. If you’re not, pick it up on your lunch hour, and it will have you smiling even at work.
Theo Ryan, the son of New York show biz parents, left his colorful backstage childhood behind to settle quietly as a drama professor at a backwater North Carolina university. Though he does have a play tucked away in a drawer (a drama about Sir Walter Raleigh, which a workshop director once cruelly panned), the most colorful thing in Theo’s life now is his friendship with Ford Rexford, a leading playwright and famous drunk, whose biography Theo is writing.
Ford pushes Theo to escape his safe little life, and Theo decides to go for it: he auditions for an amateur production of Guys and Dolls, gives in to a dizzying crush on a university preacher named Maude Fletcher, and even shows Ford his play.
Naturally, disaster follows.
Through a complicated series of events, Theo finds himself chasing the only copy of his manuscript to England, turning his play into an elaborate forgery of Raleigh’s work, and planting it where an elderly English Raleigh scholar will find it.
Needless to say, there is soon more drama in Theo’s life than just the academic infighting (hilariously drawn) in his university English Department.
This is a wonderfully affectionate satire of the modern academic lit crit business and the theatrical world. It’s rounded out with a bunch of memorably loopy minor characters and a hopeful little romance.
If you still have some summer left after you chuckle your way through Foolscap, try my other favorite academic satire, Richard Russo’s Straight Man, or these other show biz satires:
- The Best Revenge: A Novel of Broadway, by Sol Stein
- The Lives of Circus Animals, by Christopher Bram
- Me and Orson Welles, by Robert Kaplow
