The Rock Springs Chronicles

Pedants, poseurs and baseball players-turned-professors populate the ""evangelically nondenominational"" rural central Illinois campus of Rock Springs College, the setting of McGill's desultory comic novel of academia gone awry. Soon after Sidney Lanier (his name is one of many sly literary references) retires his St. Louis Browns uniform in 1953 to teach ""philosophy, orthoepy, natural philosophy, and literature"" at Rock Springs, he is named president of the ""brave little college."" Back in the days when he was still a pitcher, Sid's eccentric, pseudo-intellectual discourse inspired fellow Browns teammate Billy Jim (aka ""William James"") Dinwiddie to resume his own studies. Though Billy Jim is expelled from graduate school for spurious reasons, Sid taps him to be Rock Springs' new dean and head baseball coach. Invoking melodrama and sheer absurdity as comic devices, McGill charts the history of Rock Springs through to Sid's retirement. Chapters follow familiar characters (Bill Jim's thesis, ""Intertextuality and the Umbilical Cord,"" finally earns him his doctorate) and introduce such odd members of the Rock Springs community as Father Don, who settles on Rock Springs as the site for his St. William Blake End Time Ripe Harvest Anglo-Catholic Church. At times the narrative reminds one of Garrison Keillor's rural meditations, but more often it resembles a string of Saturday Night Live skits. The repetition of basic information in many of the chapters demonstrates that they function more naturally as free-standing short stories than as a cohesive novel. In fact, the narrative is better appreciated in small doses, since too extended a stay among the hapless crowd of Rock Springs can prove exhausting. (Aug.)