[...] becoming an academic in the humanities means becoming humiliatingly prosaic about the things one loves. It means having to accept the ways in which the exalted realms of the Literary, the Philosophical, or the Historical are also means to a modest paycheck and an escape from what, in Castle’s example, was “familial dreariness and the general SoCal strip-mall stupor.” It’s a fairly conformist rebellion, but also a rebellious kind of conformism, and all of it is fueled, at some level, by eros, even if an eros longing for domestic security. The book’s longest and eponymous essay is a coruscating story about the overpowering charisma of intellectual mentors and intellectualism, which despite its period trappings (Castle’s descriptions of mid-1970s academic avant-gardism reveal her novelistic talent for wry attentiveness) narrates like nothing else I know the perennially heady mixture of longing and dissatisfaction and the promise of better, wiser elders and worlds.

The young humanist, as Castle depicts her, is necessarily perverse, and certainly “neurotically invested.” She is likely to be a prig, but is also a cynic, at least about some cultural norms. She disbelieves many hoary old narratives, but still thinks academic achievement earns love. (These days: she knows all the numbers, but still thinks she will get a job.) She is the bad child of Dewey’s progressive educational model — an introvert, a solitary, an obsessive — who can fake the moves of the good child. And by trying so sincerely to earn a way into the academic middle class while feeling uneasy about it she lives out a contemporary contradiction, in which “being middle-class these days means feeling freaky a lot of the time.” She is good, in other words, at inhabiting the gap between sincerity and irony, between cultural gatekeeper and cultural rebel, between grandiosity and humility. And she is good at making others feel similarly.

Richard Rorty once argued that Western culture needs the novel, in order to force us to imagine lives and destinies different from our own. Perhaps the humanities, in their current plight, need to be novelistic again. Not necessarily in their fictional mode, such as the moribund campus novel genre with its essentially demystifying comedy, but the novelistic ability to marshal narratives and details that give us back some sense of why the humanities exist for individuals — how, to put it bluntly, they still rescue lives. One doesn’t enter the academy to become a disillusioned professional (although that will happen along the way). One doesn’t enter it to equip businesses with flexible analytic intellects (although that will also happen). One enters it, shamefacedly and unhappily, perhaps, but enters it nonetheless, in order to devote oneself to something greater than personal resentments — to salvational or transformational modes of thought. Because, put another way, all the grievances that take aim at higher education express real suffering, and that suffering has causes and modes of expression older than most sufferers usually know. The humanities should be, if not their solace, then their weapons of choice. Prig and cynic and naïf she may be, but the newly minted academic knows this — after all, she most likely came from their midst — and one good way of explaining as much is to explain how that knowledge feels. Without such explanations, which might soften resentment into curiosity or sympathy, there may soon be very little left to be embarrassed about.