[Mark Harris] has returned to one of the oldest novelistic forms to relate his new story about an academic hero…. Samuel Richardson wrote the "first English novel" ("Pamela," 1939) through the narrative device of letters, which "Wake Up, Stupid" also uses.

What is more significant is that Mr. Harris has returned to tradition in attitude as well as technique. Through the apparently haphazard letters from a dozen sources that shuffle in and out as casually as day-by-day life itself, he has woven a taut thematic thread….

A bewildering number of characters make their epistolary entrances….

Yet all these characters, all these problems, and all these different Lee Youngdahls add up to one process in Mr. Harris' book—the proper way an individual should define himself, in relation to his work and in relation to the people he works with.

"Wake up, stupid"—the clarion call of a Youngdahl classroom...