Book Review

Castleman in the Academy
by Charles Rammelkamp
Knopf Publishing Group, 2007
www.randomhouse.com/knopf.
ISBN: 0307265838

Charles Rammelkamp's Castleman in the Academy is a novel told in eleven short stories about Roger Castleman—a middle-aged English professor at a community college—whose angsty ruminations on teaching, writing, and personal satisfaction serve as a narrative center.

The series begins with "Goddess of Wisdom." Telling the story from the third-person perspective balances Castleman's bored-academic, anxious tone with sentences like, "He always feels as though he is peering through a filmy mist that is more than just the dust and dandruff on the glasses." We learn about Castleman through his bumbling, half-hearted delivery of a lecture on the haiku and his apparent disdain for his students.

The stories that follow, mostly told in the first-person, develop this idea of the teacher teaching to a lost audience. Castleman's students are a stereotypical bunch—an African-American woman who has six kids and works two jobs, the boys with backward baseball caps, and busty co-eds. The examples of student term papers are more squirm-worthy than the graphic sex stories of his students because of their blatant political incorrectness.

The most awkwardly handled pieces, however, try to address censorship and banal morality. Castleman teaches a creative writing class where Mandy, who "had big tits that she liked to display in tight, low-cut blouses, frequently made of sheer material beneath which her black brassiere lurked like an underwater predator," writes a short story about sex for its shock value. A few thirty-something women in the class express their outrage and demand that Castleman "silence Mandy." He consents and writes Mandy an e-mail to shame her; first describing his own youthful obsession of writing about "fucking girls with their periods, very anatomically detailed" and then about his desire for her to tone down her writing to suit an audience that includes mothers.

But then we're subjected to Castleman's own grotesque story that describes an infected, pus-dripping foreskin. He reads this soon-to-be published piece to his class to increase his cool factor. The exercise fails completely, as does the reader's understanding of why Castleman censored a female student's graphic material while then presenting a more foul sexual account of his own creation. In truth, these stories work neither as commentaries on middle-class mores nor as pieces of smut.

Rammelkamp is at his best when writing about the act of teaching creative writing. He has Castleman's brother, a burned-out schemer, rant, "Credit! Christ, talk about a scam! That's about all 'higher education' has come too—making a buck! Credit! They get credit!" The reader knows that Castleman agrees with his brother, but must put up some kind of fight to defend his occupation. These exchanges voice the duality of Castleman's person.

Most of the stories do work together to form a novel. The alternating third- and first-person narration is an effective way to tell this man's story. However, a story written from the perspective of a student in Castleman's class should be completely disregarded. It adds nothing to our understanding of his character. Rammelkamp's prose is enjoyable and well-written, but ultimately the reader shares Castleman's confusion and blurred vision by the end.