Collegiate Gothic Skewers Academia (and Ohio) in Fine Form
By Rebecca Moon Ruark
Ohio is Ohio. If you’re up on the latest middle-school slang—or have read the astute Anesa Miller essay “Is Ohio Literature a Thing? Should it Be?”—you know what I mean. “Ohio” equals cringey, uncool, maybe even weird.
“Ohio” wasn’t a derogatory term when I was in middle school. But nearby Cleveland, where I experienced horizon-expanding art, culture, and cannoli, was often referred to as “the Mistake on the Lake.” The nickname stung. It also imprinted on me a fierce loyalty and an even fiercer desire to rename the beleaguered home I left at nineteen. Perhaps I had no other choice but to become a writer.
Reimagine, retell, and rename a time or place? Isn’t that what fiction writers do? While my fellow college English majors were studying Raymond Carver, I gravitated to Ohio-born William Dean Howells who helped spur the late 19th century Local Color movement, which emphasized setting and regionalisms, like dialect.
After living away from Ohio for twenty years, and thinking a lot about the portrayal of place in literature, in 2017 I started a book blog called Rust Belt Girl. With a few keystrokes I adopted a nickname and forged a connection to the contemporary writing and writers of my native region.
My definition of “Rust Belt literature” is expansive, and has as much to do with feeling as with zip code. Must there be elements of realism and regionalism, of grit? Not always, but I like those atmospherics. In any case, I’ve always held Ohio fiction, in particular, to a certain standard: namely, weird.
Part satirical campus novel, part police procedural, and part architectural treatise, with Collegiate Gothic author and self-proclaimed “armchair philosopher” Matthew Meduri measures up to my standard. His debut novel’s plot winds and wends like the disorienting, labyrinthine halls of the academic building that houses the philosophy department where we find our main character, young academic Will Thierry, crashing out (in popular parlance).
Make the speaker a Greek chorus, only give it a Midwestern accent (“Ope”); add the beautiful out-of-towner antagonist behaving badly (a la Emma Cline’s The Guest); and stir. As the novel opens, the state-school philosophy department is on the chopping block, and so is Thierry’s budding career. Striving to get ahead, the young professor creates of his own life an absurdist tragi-comedy out of the publish-or-perish mandate. He sleeps with the department chair’s wife while fending off the advances of the too-smart department secretary. Dreaming of escaping to Paris, he tries to woo a job from an influential French philosopher on the basis of his debut, a metaphilosophy that declares philosophy is dead; you can imagine how that goes. All the while, paranoid that he’s being stalked by an ex-girlfriend, Thierry’s sophomore book attempt languishes, and he loses his grip on the tenuous reality of campus life, threatening to take his poor students down with him.
The story begins at the end, as it were, with a short chapter titled “The Dead Girl Show”, voiced in the manner of a carnival barker: “Come and see the dead girl whose body lies motionless in a rented room at the old Athens Motor Inn,” it starts. And it concludes: “These events don’t happen all the time, folks, not in a small town like Athens, Ohio. A place where outsiders go for an education and insiders stay for the insulation. A quaint Midwest suburb, a good place to raise children. Where crime rates are low, and boredom is at an all-time high. Where you can try to escape your past, but your future will deny it. Welcome to The Dead Girl Show.”
I’m no expert critic of the modern campus novel. Far from it, I generally eschew campus novels (excepting Vladimir Nabakov’s Pnin), for their othering settings and dithering plots. (Or, maybe I’ve spent too much time on both the academic and marketing ends of academia to find any escapism in the genre.) Caveat: I have long admired Patricia Ehrens’ 2013 The Virgins as the model modern boarding school novel, a ratcheting up, if you will, of the campus novel, featuring younger subjects, more money, and higher stakes. Meduri’s novel, like The Virgins, is a campus love story gone terribly wrong (as in, a lot happens) told through deliciously unreliable narration.
What further distinguishes Meduri’s novel from the co-ed pack is the satirical criticism that hits just right at just the right American moment, a time when the future of higher education seems uncertain at best. Collegiate Gothic turns the academic novel on its head by taking our notions of academia, philosophy, tragedy, and comedy—all built on ancient Greek foundations—and making them decidedly 21st century ‘Merican.
The home-grown setting works as a character all its own. What better stage than a MidAmerican state forever bent to the cycles of industry, decline, and end-stage capitalism?
Set at the not-so fictionalized, sprawling Athens University, the novel skewers higher education as one more playground for corporate greed and brand marketers (inventive naming conventions bring to mind the work of George Saunders).
Then there’s the architectural thread that contributes to the setting and to Collegiate Gothic’s “Ohio” vibes. The Gothic-style academic building that houses the philosophy department, “designed by the Italian architect Paolo Mezzanitti … was meant to embody the idea of the quest for knowledge, but it became Il Labirinto di Pensiero Vuoto: The Labyrinth of Empty Thought.”
Meduri’s treatment of this setting—much of it presented as a proof copy of a biography of the architect, complete with footnotes—is my favorite element of the novel for its strangeness (and ample injections of Italian-American history). Take, for instance, the building appearing in a trippy dream of Thierry’s:
“The inscription above the door reads LASCIATE OGNE SPERANZA / VOI CH’INTRATE [trans.: Abandon all hope, ye who enter.] He walks inside to what looks more like a funhouse maze than an old building. He thinks he’ll find solace in his office if he can just get there, but the halls twist and turn. He sees himself running in several directions at once like an M.C. Escher lithograph. Random sets of staircases. He takes one, but they all look the same. The feeling of falling is ever present.”
Weird, right? And why not? If, as Miller argues, East Coast fiction is big-five-publishable (I read: safe, even staid), might Ohio fiction be more forward-looking in form and feeling? (Much like our “Ohio Territory” itself.) Certainly from Ohio’s literary beginnings with Sherwood Anderson’s Modernist Winesburg, Ohio—arguably one of the first novels of its kind, as Miller notes—to the mythic works of Toni Morrison to the metafiction of William H. Gass, Ohio novelists have been doing something new (even if in doing so they skewer their own) since Ohio was Ohio.
Haven’t we read enough about ivy-covered ivory towers (an invasive species in more than one way)?
Is this pollyanna literary apologetics on my part, because Ohio novels don’t become bestsellers, don’t get optioned for film? I don’t think so. Think about the modern historical and cultural touchpoints of the Cleveland area, in particular: a place that experienced the Kent State shootings, Ghoulardi, Harvey Pekar, the Pretenders, and the forever-polarizing Free Stamp is not going to produce made-for-TV fiction.
I say, we write our own stories—and own them. I say, make it weird. Make it, as Meduri has done, Ohio.
Collegiate Gothic by Matthew Meduri was released by Bordighera Press in 2024
Rebecca Moon Ruark is an Ohio-born-and-raised writer living near Annapolis, MD. Her stories, articles, interviews, and reviews appear in literary journals, university magazines, and at her bookish blog, Rust Belt Girl. Hard at work on a historical novel set along the Lake Erie shore, she can be found at rebeccamoonruark.com.
