Paris in the Present Tense

by Mark Helprin

and she knew that, tenure or not, she might not last long, perhaps not even until retirement, although having seen the quiet desperation of professors emeritus she wanted to work until she dropped. How could she communicate the reality of war and its effects – her field was twentieth-century France – without upsetting some Alice-in-Wonderland student who, having experienced nothing and been hypnotized into victimhood, would demand a trigger warning? It was a madhouse, made even more difficult for her in navigating the shoals of what was her second language after French, the third being a childhood Arabic fortified by some later study. To her astonishment, she was forbidden to describe atrocities against white people or men. At first she thought this was a joke, but it wasn’t, and she quickly came to the realization that such a regime was merely a mechanism to give power to one or another struggling political faction in the highly infected, incestuous bloodstream of the university.

Helprin sounding like Wolfe