Pictures of failure and pain

There's an interesting review here, by Andrew Hay, of Elaine Showalter's Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents:

The real strength of Faculty Towers is the verve with which Showalter adumbrates a coherent line of changes in the social, professional and personal mores of those who inhabit the university, as well as how these individual characters function as a microcosm of a society that shifts from the patriarchal conformity of the 1950s in Snow's The Masters, to the rebellion of the 1960s in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim; from the careerism of the 1970s, explored in Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man, to the jet-setting theory crowd of David Lodge's Small World in the 1980s.

In recent years, academic matters take a depressing turn, with Showalter sensing a 'bleaker' tone in contemporary campus fiction. The 1990s disintegrate into dangerous sexual liaisons between students and teachers and unpleasant confrontations with personal inadequacy, as in the case of Coetzee's David Lurie, Philip Roth's Coleman Silk and Franzen's Chip Lambert. It is, however, in the twenty-first century where Showalter is most homiletic. Indeed, what she has to say is far from jovial and is aptly expressed by her final chapter heading: 'Into the Twenty-First Century: Tragic Towers.'

At one point the reviewer is prompted by his subject matter to write:

[T]he picture of academic life that emerges is far from happy. In fact, those privileged to attend university share a feeling of unhappiness... [W]e ponder why hardly any academics are happy where they are, no matter how apt the students, how generous the salary or perks, how beautiful the setting, how light the teaching load, how lavish the research budget. I don't know if it's academia itself that attracts misfits and malcontents or if the overwhelming hypocrisy of that world would have turned even the von Trapp family sullen.

That seems rather strong to me: the extent of the assumed unhappiness, 'misfits and malcontents', and 'overwhelming hypocrisy of that world'. Is there an overwhelming hypocrisy about it, greater than in other spheres of life? Are there more misfits and malcontents here than elsewhere? Yet it has often struck me that academics ought to be more contented than a lot of them seem to be. Much about the lives they - or, rather, we - lead is rewarding and indeed enviable, and the degree of dissatisfaction seems out of tune with this. But then again, I'm only gauging things from my own experience, and since all of my professional life has been as an academic, I'm not well placed to know whether the level of unhappiness in universities is particular to the milieu or merely the expression of a more general human tendency.