Thanks to Professor Roger Meiners, I discovered the work of Randall Jarrell when I was an undergraduate at Michigan State, and I was instantly taken with his academic comedy, Pictures from an Institution.*

The novel is set at a private women's college called Benton, and it abounds with shrewd, sharp, epigrammatic descriptions of the local fauna, endlessly quotable.

The president: “President Robbins was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins.”

The president’s “Field Theory of Conversation”: “He always found out what your field was (if you hadn’t had one I don’t know what he would have done; but this had never happened) and then talked to you about it. After a while he had told you what he thought about it, and he would have liked to hear what you thought about it, if there had been time.”

The president’s wife: ”People did not like Mrs. Robbins, Mrs. Robbins did not like people; and neither was sorry.”

The sociologist: “Dr. Whittaker spent his life either explaining things or having things explained to him.”

Dr. Whittaker’s conversation: “[E]ach sentence lived its appointed term, died mourned by its people, and was succeeded by a legitimate heir.”

Flo Whittaker: “She treated you, no matter who you were, exactly as she treated everyone else, so that after she had talked to you a while you almost doubted that you existed, except in some statistical sense.”

I have to stop before I violate copyright. But this is a book you ought to know.

* It appears, wonderfully, to be in print again as a Phoenix Fiction Series paperback.