Gerber, Michael. Freshman. New York: Hyperion, 2006. ISBN 0-7868-3850-7.

Summary: Hart Fox, a clever, likeable high-school student applies to a dilapidated Ivy League university, is accepted, and matriculates. During his first year, he encounters an appalling crowd of snobs, careerists, frat boys, and malicious asses, but makes a few friends of unusual talent and insight, particularly after he joins the staff of the campus humor magazine.

Everything about the university, from its admissions process to its location and physical plant, is envisioned in extravagant, satirical, and ridiculous terms. The streets surrounding the university are called Mantis, Ant, Beetle, Locust, and so on, because the university's second president hoped to curry favor with the alien insect invaders that, he believed, were about to overrun the earth. The carillon plays the theme from The Simpsons. The University Museum promotes its exhibits by hiring students, under the title “Community Interface Specialists,” to dress up in costumes and hand out flyers. Hart gets to wear the giant squid costume with the forty-foot tentacles and the light-up hat, inviting passers-by to see “Giant Squid, Garbo of the Deep”: “Join the intrepid crew of the research ship Insipid as they fail to find one of the ocean's most mysterious creatures.” One of Hart's classmates is a vampire who has already graduated thirty-eight times, but keeps re-enrolling so as to avoid having to get a real job.

Despite several assassination attempts by envious rivals and the threat of bankruptcy posed by the university's enormous tuition charges, the protagonist makes it to the end of the academic year. There are various hints that this is the first volume of a tetralogy.

The book is being marketed to post-pubescent high-school students and is written to appeal to their fantasies of what undergraduate life might be like. It's comparable to Animal House, but somewhat less gross and with occasional flashes of satire.

The author has set up a Web site for the notional university. I found the Web site funnier than the book, because the author is freed from the exigencies of plot and dialogue and can focus on ridicule.