Mislaid by Nell Zink. It is hilarious. There is quite a bit of send-up of academia, particularly Southern academia and the mores of the Southern bourgeois.
I am looking at the current Amazon listing and realizing how lucky I was I got this as a "daily deal," when it was on sale.
https://www.amazon.com/Mislaid-Novel...4488917&sr=8-1
Here are some of my favorite quotes from the first 40% of the book as an example.
“She had read enough lives of the poetesses to know all about inpatient psychiatric care.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid
“She would see that in England, for reasons unknown, a woman can simultaneously be cute as a bug’s ear, a serious rose gardener, and a nymphomaniac.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid
“As a writer, she was struggling. As an accomplice to the wholesale drug trade, she was setting new benchmarks for excellence in felony crime.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid
“If and when family planning is the responsibility of females, males are best kept under lock and key.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid
“It was a pastiche of public library porn from Irving Stone to Philip Roth.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid