Nick Moran is one of that hapless tribe you hear about on occasion: an English Ph D who can’t find a job. Even when he does, years later and after a second career as a hack Hollywood screenwriter falls apart, the department at a university in Auckland, New Zealand, turns out to be a hornet’s nest of paranoia, arbitrary power, and guilt by association. When his consensual relationship with a student leads not just to scandal and public disgrace but a threat of prosecution for ‘human rights violations, ‘ he finds himself in a still more confounding limbo of uncertain identity and thwarted hope. His path out of despair takes him to New York, where he slips into another limbo of drugs and sex, and then to Paris, where he helps his best friend Haley, lost in her own shadows, back from an edge of madness.
Jadual kandungan
Part 1: Amor Fati
Part 2: Down Under
Part 3: A Perfect Trap
Part 4: In Limbo
Coda
Mengenai Pengarang
STEFAN MATTESSICH is the author of three novels: Point Guard, a coming-of-age story set on the Northern California coast of Mendocino; East Brother, a satire about gentrification in a fictional California beach town; and The Riverbed, about intelligent young people coming to learn about the darker sides of the suburban dream they call home. He went to Yale College and has a Ph D in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he wrote a monograph on the fiction of Thomas Pynchon called Lines of Flight, published by Duke University Press. He has also written a wide variety of literary criticism and cultural theory. He teaches English at Santa Monica College and lives in Los Angeles.