The Dean's List

By Jon Hassler
Ballantine, $24

ISBN 0345416376

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Interview by Alden Mudge

How is it that the author of the very funny new novel, "The Dean's List," is not yet a famous American writer?

True, Jon Hassler enjoys a devoted word-of-mouth following. The soulful "Staggerford" (published, at last, in 1977, when he was 42 years old) is, Hassler admits, "a cult book among English teachers, at least around Minnesota." His seven subsequent novels are recommended by knowledgeable librarians and thoughtful booksellers all over the country. His most recent book, "Rookery Blues" received high praise. And Hassler counts First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton as one of his more famous fans.

But Hassler's name sparks no flicker of recognition in the eyes of most of my well-read friends, and I wonder how that can be.

It's not a question Jon Hassler feels comfortable opining about. In fact, during a recent phone interview about "The Dean's List," Hassler, an appealingly soft-spoken and apparently shy man, deflects all the large questions about themes and meaning that set lesser writers strutting in the footlights.

"You know," he says, "I tell these stories. I guess there are themes there, but it's the stories that I'm interested in. Those large questions, I'm not the one to ask. I'm not sure a writer needs to understand his book entirely anyway. And I'm not sure a book is entirely finished until a reader reads it."

Like his previous stories, "The Dean's List" is set in a small town in northern Minnesota and is peopled with characters who lead "normal" lives but whom Hassler masterfully imbues with a set of virtues that are a blend of the ridiculous and the sublime. Hassler, himself a recently retired English professor, is particularly good at capturing the ridiculous goings-on among academics at the fictional -- and entertainingly mediocre -- Rookery State College, also the scene of the action in his previous novel.

Not exactly a sequel to "Rookery Blues," "The Dean's List" is told through the voice of Leland Edwards, a character we previously met when he was a young English professor and jazz pianist in the Icejam Quintet. Now, 25 years later, the 58-year-old Edwards is dean of the college and lives with his mother, Lolly, the outlandish local radio personality who, in one of the book's funnier subplots, organizes her own wake before she dies so that she can hear the eulogy.

A sharp and sometimes not-quite-sympathetic observer of the tomfoolery around him, Edwards is a character for whom Hassler expresses some affinity. "He's a little lonely, like a lot of my main characters have been over the years. And then, he's so rooted there. I've been rooted in northern Minnesota all my life; I've never moved. And I appreciate that quality in him. He's also very loyal to his college. I value that very highly." In the book's main action, the good Dean Edwards butts heads with the athletic director over the dedication of the college's new hockey arena. In a brilliant turn of events, Edwards arranges for Richard Falcon, the most famous poet in America, to dedicate the arena with a poetry reading. Hassler's remarkable portrayal of the event is the high point of the book.

"Poetry has never meant so much to me in my life as it has recently." Hassler says. "For some reason, I keep going back to poems I memorized as a kid. A lot of them are Frost poems; I just love them. My head was full of poems about the time I started writing this book, so I brought the poet in. Then I decided to use poems I wrote when I took myself seriously as a poet, 30 years ago when I was teaching up at Bemidji State. Back then I wrote in strict rhythm and rhyme. You could dance a polka to my poems. I decided Richard Falcon wrote a long time ago and he might have written poems like these, so I put my poems in the book."

Like Robert Frost, Hassler's Falcon is "not the kindly old grandfatherly figure that everybody think's he's going to be." The poet gives Edwards a hard time as he tries to complete his final masterwork and suffers from odd fugue states that may be due to Parkinson's disease, an affliction Hassler himself was recently diagnosed with.

Even riskier than putting poetry near the center of his book, Hassler makes room in his fictional community for disease and aging. Edwards and his mother make weekly visits to the Senior Hi-Rise, home to some of the most wonderfully cranky minor characters in recent fiction.

"I spent seven years visiting my mother in a similar place in a small town in Minnesota," Hassler recalls. "I'd go up there once a week and we'd have our peach delight and our coffee. I got to know these people pretty well. I just felt so at home with them that I wanted to write about them. People get outspoken at that age, and I like that. I just love people talking at odds, going off in their own directions."

Hassler is sometimes sentimental but never a Pollyanna. Bad things happen to characters here and in his other novels. Still, there is a kind of light in his books that others have attributed to his strong religious feelings.

"I'm not as devout as I used to be before I began to write," Hassler says when asked. "I think writing comes from the same source as my religious devotion, so I use it up and it takes time for the well to fill again. But I'm not sure that the optimism and the success of my characters in overcoming darkness is really connected to my religion. I think it's connected to a belief I have in the ongoing quality of life. People survive and are stronger for their suffering. It's just the feeling I have about life."

Strong, likable, and oh-so-human characters, writing that stays out of the way of the story, small-town communities in which readers might actually like to live. Jon Hassler must be plain lousy at bombast and media hype. How else to explain why his novels aren't known to everyone?