James Hynes

James Hynes

1956-

Entry Updated : 05/26/2004
Birth Place: Okemos, MI

Personal Information: Family: Born in 1955, in Okemos, MI. Education: University of Michigan, B.A., 1977; University of Iowa, M.F.A., 1989. Addresses: Home: Austin, TX. Agent: c/o Picador, St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Ave., Rm. 1715, New York, NY 10010.

Career: Writer. Taught creative writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Miami University, and University of Texas, Austin.

Awards: Hopwood Award, University of Michigan, 1976; Michener fellowship; first prize Adult Literature Award from the Friends of American Writers, 1991, for The Wild Colonial Boy.

WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:

The Wild Colonial Boy, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1990.
Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Horror, Picador (New York, NY), 1997.
The Lecturer's Tale, Picador USA (New York, NY), 2001.
Kings of Infinite Space, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor of television criticism articles to periodicals, including Mother Jones and Utne Reader; contributor of literary reviews to periodicals, including Washington Post, Boston Review, American Scholar, and New York Times Book Review.

Works in Progress: A novel.

"Sidelights"

James Hynes's three volumes of fiction have been well received by critics. Jack Holland, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called The Wild Colonial Boy a "compelling narrative" which is "usually convincing and at times powerfully so." Jonathan Yardley, who reviewed Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror for the Washington Post, called the collection of three humorous horror novellas about American academia "wickedly funny stuff, and dead on target."

In 1982, at age twenty-seven, Hynes was on a walking tour in England when the idea for The Wild Colonial Boy came to him. Sitting in a youth hostel, he plotted a few pages and altered his travel plans to include a week in Belfast. When he returned to his home in Michigan, he conducted extensive research and in 1987 went to England again, where he sharpened his eye for detail.

The "Wild Colonial Boy" of the novel's title is a young American named Brian Donovan who goes to Belfast equipped with a vague sense of the region's politics but also with ten thousand dollars for the Irish Republican Army--a contribution from his dying grandfather in Detroit. He delivers the money to his cousin, but her husband, an active I.R.A. member, cajoles Brian into being a courier once again, this time with plastic explosives to be delivered in London. Brian becomes involved with a young American woman, Clare Delaney, but things turn tragic when the explosives are delivered and set off in a crowded British museum. Holland called the novel "a powerful testimony to the alarming potential" of "ideological narcissism." A reviewer for Library Journal commented, "The hard realism is frequently terrifying, the plot is believable, and the narrative drive never slackens."

Publish and Perish uniquely combines academic comedy with horror to create a "delicious . . . genre book for those who don't really like genre books," as Cathleen Schine wrote in the New York Times Book Review. The first tale, "Queen of the Jungle," involves Paul, a professor at a midwestern college, his wife Elizabeth, a professor at a university in Chicago, and Elizabeth's vengeful cat Charlotte, who is the only creature who knows of Paul's affair with a student.

In the second novella, "99," Gregory, a promising but intellectually rigid young anthropologist who becomes naively involved in academic politics, ends up leaving academia after a disastrous conference to work for the BBC in England. The BBC program involves the "cultural uses" of ancient ruins, for which Gregory seems well-suited since, as Hynes writes, "he came from a generation of anthropologists who had forsworn fieldwork as colonialist, essentialist, and racist, just another tool of cultural imperialism." Cathleen Schine observed in the New York Times that the project leaves Gregory to "deconstruct cultural monuments in order to construct a more glamorous image of himself . . . it is just this cynical vanity and ambition that ultimately destroy him." Schine continued, "In a perfect terror-comedy conclusion that includes the traditional human sacrifice and damp vaults, Gregory the critical theorist ends up deconstructing himself."

In "Casting the Runes," Virginia, a brilliant historian teaching in Texas, finds her tenure in the hands of a senior colleague, known as "Vic the Impaler," who uses witchcraft on younger colleagues after stealing their work; she has three months to overcome the curse he's placed upon her. Hynes notes in an afterword that "Casting the Runes" is a "pastiche of a short story of the same name by M. R. James . . . author of the greatest ghost stories in the English language."

A Publishers Weekly reviewer commented that the strength of the "cleverly barbed" novellas in Publish and Perish lay in "their artful prose and their ability to puncture pomposity and ambition in order to expose the human frailties behind them." A critic for Kirkus Reviews called the novellas "original, droll, startling tales of horror in academia," and declared, "Hynes creates pungent satires of academic life while at the same time infusing them with genuine suspense and real terror." In the Washington Post, critic Jonathan Yardley deemed the book "entirely delightful." He considered its academic satires superb, and added that Hynes is "no less confident as a chronicler of horror, or terror, among the genteel."

Academe again provides the setting for The Lecturer's Tale, a novel that New York Times Book Review contributor Tobin Harshaw considered even "more grimly comic" than Hynes's earlier satire. The book centers on protagonist Nelson Humboldt, an intellectual innocent who finds himself completely out of his depth at the prestigious University of the Midwest, where various factions in the English department--among them post-colonial theorists, lesbian radicals, and champions of "Celebrity Studies"--are warring for power. After losing his lowly job as an instructor in composition, Nelson suffers a freak accident in which his finger is severed; after the digit is surgically reattached, Nelson discovers he can use it to make others do his bidding. Given this Faustian power, he chooses to use it to assume control of the English department and get tenure for his office mate. A writer for Kirkus Reviews appreciated the novel's "piercing" insights into the academic mentality, concluding that "Hynes . . . bathes his ship of overeducated fools in such luscious detail (the trends! the allusions! the hairstyles!) that he vaults to the head of the crowded class of academic satirists."

Harshaw expressed equal enthusiasm for the novel. "Hynes has hit on a brilliant ploy in weaving Gothic horror with contemporary lit crit," he noted. "The Lecturer's Tale . . . shows to what extent any sense of good-naturedness in the groves of academe has dissipated since, say, David Lodge stopped writing his academic comedies of manners." Harshaw continued, "The novel is well suited to an era when we realize that the culture wars of the 1980s and 90s were being fought not over the soul of society but over the hearts and minds of a bunch of moribund graduate students unlikely ever to find jobs in their chosen fields. With the stakes so far diminished, nothing is left but the pettiness. At least James Hynes has the good sense to play it for laughs."

WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:

"Sidelights"

FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

BOOKS

PERIODICALS

OTHER