Prot U

Reviewer's Bookwatch, Dec, 2004 by Lenore Thomson Bentz

Prot U

Eva Augustin Rumpf

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Format: PDF (ebook)

ISBN: 1591135095 $13.95 Ebook Price: $6.95 184 pages

This is a deceptively easy book to read--a bit like last generation's medical-center satire, The House of God. The latter, once described as Catch-22 with stethoscopes, employed dark humor to mount a devastating indictment of the way physicians were trained in the 1970s. The ambitions of Prot U are not as large, but the book subjects academia to a similar farcical viewpoint, offering campus life as a microcosm of the perennial clash between politics and social responsibility.

For this reason, the book is fun to read simply as a short and well-paced novel about the colorful characters fictional Protestant U has brought together for a single academic season. However, the fact that the story is set in Texas allows the reader to infer a wry and subversive commentary on the corporate style of administration that emerged under the Bush governorship, and the difficulty of journalists to buck the system on which their livelihoods depended.

As a journalist herself who has worked in Texas, Rumpf knows this territory well, and she clearly enjoyed the opportunity to skewer some of the class and social roles that Texas culture appears to encourage. The book manages, however, to keep its humor light, skirting the mean-spiritedness of genuinely black comedy. At its core is a warm affection for the unsung heroes of our time, whose refusal to delegate individual responsibility to the corporate body always has its price.

Eva Augustin Rumpf is a former reporter, university journalism instructor, and student media adviser. Her articles have appeared in newspapers and magazines around the country, and she is co-author of a self-help book on divorce. She lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with her husband. PROT U is her first novel.