Domers: A Year at Notre Dame.

In his highly acclaimed A Day in the Night of America (Viking), about high school football in a small Texas town, Kevin Coyne combined a talent for astute observation of meaningful daily details with a penchant for soppy turns of phrase. Allowing Coyne to give these tendencies free rein on the 1,250 tradition-laden acres of the campus of the University of Notre Dame has resulted in a book of impressive scope and telling detail, but one also peppered with lines like these: "The morning light slanted into the empty nave through the tall stained glass windows. The dust motes caught in the sun's path were spot-lighted in rainbow hues, like the floating stars a fullback sees after taking a sharp hit."

Coyne, in addition to being a journalist and free-lance writer, is also the grandson of a "subway alum"--one of the vast array of men and women who have never set foot on the campus of Notre Dame but who are fiercely loyal to her. On a quest to feed his curiousity about the university's mystique, Coyne attended the football games whose telecasts subway alumni never miss, but he then kept his tape rolling long after the NBC cameramen had packed up theirs. He stayed around to see Saturday's "Fighting Irish" become the rest of the week's "Domers" (as students call themselves, referring to the landmark golden dome that sits atop the administration building). Domers is rather like a 352-page version of the thirty-second promo spot one sees during televised football games--but with a journalistic kick. Coyne takes the reader to a cleric-led English seminar, a nationally reputed entomology laboratory, women's intramural touch football games, and volunteer tutoring sessions with South Bend gradeschoolers. And the journalist in him sees no reason to steer clear of contentious faculty meetings and administration building sit-ins. The back cover blurb indicates that Coyne had "unprecedented access to every corner of Notre Dame," and indeed it appears as though the only things to which he was not privy were trustees' meetings and investment decisions.

He didn't miss much. Working his way into the nooks and crannies that make up the Notre Dame experience, Coyne acquires an insider's feel for everything from administrative conundrums to the innuendoes and in jokes of dormitory skits. A diverse cross-section of students, faculty, and staff is high-lighted, and the soon-familiar names and stories allow for an appreciation of the rhythms and events of the academic year. Among those whom Coyne follows are Dana Ciacciarelli, an aspiring entomologist; Geoff Slevin, her engineering boyfriend; Corey Babington, rap artist and science-business major; Claire Johnson, ardent prolife activist; Father Bill Seetch, dorm rector; Steve Sabo, alternative rock DJ; and Jimmy Z, campus night cook and "Ultimate Fan." Coyne's keen and sympathetic eye is not unlike that of the master of the nonfiction participant-observer genre, Tracy Kidder (House, Among Schoolchildren).

Coyne does not comment on the subtletics of the current debate on the state of Catholic higher education. The often caustic discussions about Catholic character--discussions which were at times quite heated during his year on a campus "that attracts every stripe of Catholic, from severe traditionalists to vow-of-poverty liberals, all of whom, to some degree, expect Notre Dame to reflect their vision of Catholicism"--are recorded. Coyne attended a regular series of faculty meetings called "Conversation on the Catholic Character" and his faithful transcription of snatches of dialogue concerning hiring quotas, Catholic intellectual life, and the mission of the Catholic university are provocative without being sensational. His extracurricular talks with the gadfly scientist, the priest author of a memo that sparked an outcry, and presidents past and present, are balanced, frank and, at times, quite fascinating.

But like a lemming to the sea, Coyne is impelled to a certain nostalgic and credibility-straining portrait of the university that he considers "the nearest thing Catholic America has to a capital city." At Coyne's Notre Dame, students engage in "earnest, half-drunk arguments about Saint Thomas Aquinas" at Senior Bar; their families "leave the Volvos to the Ivies, [because] Notre Dame is a Detroit crowd"; and they toss out saccharine lines with all the aplomb of Father Chuck O'Malley:

"Meet me for breakfast?" one student

asked a friend as he left.

"Promise me?"

"Promise," the friend declared,

blessing himself. "Swear to God."

"Swear on the Dome?"

"Swear on the Dome."

It gets to be a bit much. Even the leaves of campus trees are not immune--they don't just fall, they fall "like sins cast off at confession, signaling the arrival of a long, penitential South Bend winter." When Coyne runs out of unfortunate similes and metaphors, there is always night cook Jimmy Z to pick up the slack: "I'm absolutely driven with the idea that this is the only place in the world, that this is the Garden of Eden. You walk around the lake and lookup at the Dome and you tell me the Garden of Eden is that beautiful."

Though Coyne handles the Catholicity issue--and others--well, the cotton candy mix of religiosity and hubris tends to overwhelm the palate. I suspect that Domers will discomfit many who love Notre Dame, and further exasperate those who have already had their fill of "high Domer bliss."

Mary Lee Freeman is a 1991 graduate of the University of Notre Dame, a former member of its College of Arts and Letters Advisory Council, and a former Commonweal intern.