Palatinate Books: David Nicholls Resurrects the Campus Novel

Originally published in October 2009 in Palatinate Books

It’s the start of a new term, and whilst everyone either celebrates their reunion after a long summer break or tries to find their way around Elvet Riverside, it may be worth looking around. Listen to everyone swearing in vain that they’ll finish their essays on time this year. Anticipate Saturday night in Klute. Observe the stereotypes and politics- university is society in miniature, and that’s why it’s the perfect setting for a book which can deal with all of this and more. Cue the campus novel.

Beginning in America in the early 1950s, campus novels reached Britain with the release of such novels as Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim (1954), but the traditions in the two countries have always remained separate. Writers like Amis and David Lodge, author of Nice Work and Changing Places, brought us stories of bed-hopping and class war not amongst students, but the faculty. In America, although there have been many books written about academics (Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, for example), the genre has also produced plenty of books where students were at the centre.

Thematic differences grew over the years as well. Perhaps inevitably, class division became a major addition to the British genre during the 70s and 80s, when student grants began to allow people from more diverse backgrounds than ever before the opportunity of higher education.

Perhaps the key difference, however, is that whilst consistently popular in the States, in Britain the genre has experienced decline for many years. Some critics even suggest that its concern with class has been contributory, since authors were wary of being accused of elitism. The most recent addition to the canon, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, is set in America, despite its author being a born and bred Londoner. Whatever the reasons, it has been evident in recent years that the British campus novel has been gradually disappearing.


Good job, then, that David Nicholls has revived the genre with his romantic comedy Starter for Ten. Set in 1985, it’s the first-person account of Brian Jackson, a working-class student from Southend-on-Sea who earns a place in a top university. He narrates his first year with endearing honesty as he tries desperately (and often embarrassingly) to woo the woman of his dreams, prove himself on the University Challenge team, honour the memory of his deceased father and somewhere along the line gain an education.

As you can probably guess, he finds university life a minefield. With the Thatcher government at its peak, the campus class war is being keenly felt: Brian repeatedly tries to justify himself to his upper-class flatmates, while some of the most bourgeois students invent working-class credentials to use as a political banner. Upon returning home, he has to deal with his mother’s new relationship and his growing distance from his old friends, while the anticipation builds to the climactic University Challenge match against a gloriously stereotypical Oxbridge team.

It isn’t just the politics of the time that the novel reflects - the soundtrack and fashion in every scene is described so clearly that even those of us who don’t remember it will be transported to 1985- yet none of this manages to get in the way of Brian’s coming-of-age story.

But it’s more than that, too. In a genre dominated by promiscuous lecturers and pompous professors, Starter for Ten is such a gem because it encapsulates all the elements of campus life, but reinstates them into the realm of students: indeed, it is an account of one fresher’s quest for love, friendship and advanced general knowledge which students everywhere will automatically recognise. As campus novels go, it’s one of the best.