Too smart for their own good

THE British are delicious when they misbehave. Not that they do it better than anyone else, but when the Brits get obnoxious over tea and gin, the world tunes in. At its best, British fussiness is a window into the relative health of the Western middle class. David Nokes’ novel “The Nightingale Papers” is full of English intellectuals behaving badly. But though the book is a hoot in places, it has the misfortune of sharing some of the blindness it wishes to ridicule.

Danny is a young professor of literature who has problems. He’s something of a jerk, and his girlfriend is leaving him; an arrogant joke he plays involving the provenance of a painting is the last straw for her. Furthermore, he finds perplexing a book written by his old professor, Randolph Frazier McWhinnie -- a book Danny is reviewing. Of course he’ll say nice things about it: That’s how the game is played; you say nice things about your mentors. But McWhinnie’s arguments are too neat, his proofs too precise.

What follows is a mystery that hinges on plagiarism and forgery. Danny, McWhinnie and almost everyone else are experts on the Nightingale Group, Nokes’ fictional coterie of 18th century Welsh poets led by a man named Madoc. McWhinnie has sole access to the Nightingale papers, and he’s either an aging master or a fraud. But then almost all the professors involved are to some degree frauds, a bunch of phonies who think much too highly of themselves.

The characters all meet up at a Madoc conference in Wales. Although the English academics like the Welsh in principle -- especially Welsh poets -- they apparently can’t stand Welsh people; every insult they loose on the Welsh reveals the professors as wickedly hypocritical. Meanwhile, they engage in structuralist quibbles, sophomoric practical jokes and tawdry, bourgeois sexual escapades that include “the delicious tingle of worsted against tweed” while playing footsie.

Danny takes up with a new girl, Terry Franks, an American professor of feminist literature and “the only decent-looking bit of totty” at the conference. They hang out with Carstairs, who suffers from scruples, and make fun of Baxter, who suffers from having an original mind (which in Danny’s estimation is the last thing any academic needs). On a whim, Danny and Terry go off in search of the Madoc manuscripts only McWhinnie has seen. They find them -- and lo and behold, McWhinnie’s interpretation is all wrong.

Now, if you couldn’t care less about interpreting 18th century poets, you’re right where Nokes wants you. He does one thing well, and that’s showing how frighteningly out of touch academics are. An example of their self-absorbed patter: “Observe the careful colour-coding of the parasites. This is not naturalism ... not some pre-Darwinian expression of botanical evolution, but rather a subtle pattern of cultural allusions, a kind of aesthetic code.... “ Who but an academic would engage in conversation so likely to clear all sane people from a room?

Nokes is a professor of 18th century literature at Kings College, London, so he’s skewering a world he knows well. Unfortunately, he wants to be Oscar Wilde, or at least Evelyn Waugh. His writing is skilled and his characterizations spot on. (All academics should read this book and pray to all possible gods to save them from becoming the sort of overeducated snots Nokes describes.) But his book lacks heart and a reason for being.

Comedies of manners hinge on a fine sense of the middle class. (Wilde knew the middle class to the nth degree; Waugh made his career as a sniper who could drill middle-class hypocrisy between the eyes.) That’s why we read and need them. Nokes doesn’t even know how his subjects might relate to regular folk. With the price of a good education skyrocketing, the middle class is feeling the pinch, yet Nokes still thinks the niftiest thing a writer can do is make fun of Oxford academics. Don’t get me wrong, the book is fun -- fun in the way PBS’ “Masterpiece Theatre” can be a nice escape from reality (sort of an intellectual bong hit). But in partaking in the ignorance of his characters, Nokes has betrayed his artistic trust as a writer. *