Unable to take himself, his colleagues or the university administration seriously, over the course of a week he careens through everything life can throw at him: suspected kidney stones, an irate set of staff, administrative scheming, strained friendships, the absence of his wife, the dissolution of his daughter’s marriage, and the return of his father, and to top it all off he threatens to kill a campus goose a day on live television unless he’s told the status of the department budget. He now finds himself as chair of a divided and divisive department at a time when large cuts in staff are muted. His one notable achievement was a single novel, published twenty years previously. There he has languished in a lower-tier university in a small town in the Pennsylvania rust belt, where he has remained faithful to his wife and his mother, and raised two kids. He even followed him into academia and English Literature. has lived in the shadow of his famous father, a noted literary critic and philanderer, his whole life.
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