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“You are guilty until proven innocent, and you will never be proven innocent,�� is the charge in this book and it is a sad unravelling of what inevitably happens when sense overrules sensibility in a politically correct institution of higher education.

Professor Theodore Swenson is a professor in a New England college’s creative writing program and is a former bestselling author now hobbled by writers block and mid-life crisis. The students in his class are allowed free reign with their subject matter; therefore bestiality, necrophilia and sex with professors are topics being creatively explored and insensitively critiqued in the classroom. Enter Angela, a punk dresser, former sex-chat worker and disturbed student who has a flair for writing and is determined to be published by a big house in New York, by hook or by crook, and her professor looks like a great conduit to fame. Swenson falls ass over tea kettle for her through her writing, which seems to be imitating life, his life, and the inevitable fall of the weak man and the rise of the unscrupulous woman is written on the cards. I was amazed and found it a bit implausible that a mature, jaded professor like Swenson could fall so hard.

What makes this story tragic is that Swenson is a good man, albeit a weak and inept one; he loves his wife, he desperately wants his daughter to love him, and he is kind and goes out of his way for his students. As a writer aspiring for the freedom to roam and explore, he is stifled by the need to earn a living and in having to do that within the narrow confines of a college that is scared of any impropriety that could land it in a lawsuit and imperil its funding sources. Perhaps the college’s insularity is what contributes to Swenson’s irrationality.

What interested me was the glimpse offered into this stifling world of academia which by its very political correctness is at odds with the creative process. Perhaps creative writing programs should not be run in universities and colleges, although this has now become a viable form of subsidy for writers. The classroom discussions on the various stories written by the students is a peep into a wildly creative writing group where insults and tears are par for the course. Swenson has to play two roles: a public one where he is the balanced and considerate teacher, and an internal one where he is a vitriolic critic of the hypocrisy he has to live with. This internal monologue overplays itself through the novel and becomes a bit tedious. Swenson sometimes subsides into defensiveness. It would have been just sufficient to show and not tell.

When the inevitable inquisition begins, past grudges held against the defendant by colleagues, relatives and students, and all lies and fabrications designed by those in power positions are brought to bear. And as the bells ring out in the college, the author likens it to “the Women’s Alliance announcing their triumph over another male oppressor, one small path towards a glorious future.�� The bells also spell Swenson’s liberation from oppression, the writer free at last to pursue his dream, wherever it may lead.

An easy read, posing some thought provoking questions.