The Visiting Professor

Read The Visiting Professor Storyline:

Publisher's WeeklyForsaking his customary thriller territory, Littell ( The Revolutionist ) here finds fertile new ground in the farther reaches of mathematics, which prove a wellspring of rich and consistently surprising comedy. When Lemuel Falk, a Russian ''theoretical chaoticist on the lam from terrestrial chaos,'' arrives to take up his visiting fellowship at Backwater University, he is immediately confronted by a blizzard of Americana: is it absolute confusion or, as Lemuel suspects, merely ''fool's randomness''--the facade of disorder behind which lurks a pure meaning? Many turn to him for the answer: a dope-smoking Orthodox rabbi seeking ''the chaos at the heart of the heart of the Torah,'' a libidinous female barber named Occasional Rain, and a multinational throng of spooks and spies all seeking to use Lemuel's mathematical genius for their encryption programs. A not-quite-innocent abroad fleeing Stalinist ghosts, the professor quests across the spiraling chaos of the American landscape, becoming in succession or in combination a lover, theologian, political protestor, media celebrity, homicide investigator and, finally, a refugee in the deceptively tranquil aisles of the local E-Z Mart. Littell's fast-paced satire is by turns bawdy, cerebral and touching. Library JournalWhen Lemuel Falk first arrives from the Soviet Union to take up a visiting professorship at the Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Chaos-Related Studies in upstate New York, he expects to discover a land where streets are paved with Sony Walkmans. Instead, he encounters a beautiful female barber who cadges luxury items from the grocery store, state troopers protecting the construction of a nuclear waste dump, and a serial murderer whose victims show absolutely no connection with each other. Drawn in to these issues--at first helplessly and then with more determination--the beleaguered Russian is able at last to confront and deal with his own past. Quirky characters and linguistic byplay insure the book's appeal to sophisticated readers. Littell is the author of An Agent in Place (Bantam, 1991) . -- Cynthia Johnson, Cary Memorial Lib., Lexington, Mass. BookList - Denise Perry Donavin"I am on the lam from terrestrial chaos, but I seem to take chaos with me wherever I go," states Lemuel Falk, a Soviet professor of chaos visiting an American institute dedicated to such studies. Beyond the basic chaos of the universe, Lemuel creates a good deal of the garden variety through his ignorance of American idioms and culture and his dealings with students at a nearby university. Along the way, he works to discover the identity of a serial killer, which after all is just a study of randomness--"his life's passion." Heavy-hitting humor from the author of "The Once and Future Spy" (1990).