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Filled with caustic humor about university life and written with literate style and grace, The Death of a Constant Lover escalates Nick Hoffman's involvement with mayhem and faculty meetings. When the son of a professor is murdered on a campus bridge, Nick's presence at the scene puts him right where he can't afford to be: in the middle of trouble. With his tenure review coming up, he's been warned by his department chair to avoid bad publicity.
But
Nick is forced to wade in deeper anyway, inexorably drawn
into yet another risky investigation in the surprisingly
cutthroat world of academia. He may be surrounded by
academics with deadly agendas, but he's armed with the hope
that his wit and insight will be enough to avert the death
of his career...and maybe his own as well.
From the book:
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The Great and Glorious Oz had smoke, flames, and a thundering voice to scare people with. Our chair, Coral Greathouse, was armed with a very different weapon: her composure. Bullies made me defiant and boors made me crack jokes, but people whose silence left me feeling paranoid and exposed scared me, and Coral was in that dismal pantheon. Because SUM was terrified of lawsuits, administrators rigidly adhered to procedure at all times, and it was officially time for us to get together, whether I wanted to meet or not. Coral would tell me where I stood and what I needed to do as my application for tenure and promotion to associate professor lurched forward from now into next year. What could she say that I didn't already know? I was in deep shit. And being told so would be a profound humiliation, yet it wasn't one I could avoid. |
Reviews
- Lev Raphael sets his campus mysteries at a factory-like state university in fictitious Michiganapolis, Mich., and populates them with the kind of stupid students and pretentious faculty members who blacken the eye of academia. Happily, he also gives his narrator, a lowly English professor named Nick Hoffman, license to mow down these intellectual pretenders with his scathing wit.
New York Times Book Review - Nick's smart-alecky sensibility wedded to his evident love of literature gives this novel its deliciously wicked appeal.
Washington Post Book World - ...offers some of the most pointed and funny put-downs of academics in my memory [and] shows the kind of growth in characters that you'd expect from someone as smart as Raphael.
Detroit Free Press - Read it for its witty and devastating backstage view of college life that, sadly, is probably more truth than fiction.
San Diego Union-Tribune
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