The assistant professor

the long version

In the hilarious beginning to this comic novel, Tristan meets divorcee Maura Hawkins at a nudist meeting and hastily falls in love with her. Tristan is a professor at a small midwest university; he has recently been released from a mental asylum, to which obviously (as he tells us) he was admitted unfairly. What follows is a crazy romp through a small prairie town, involving its local university, its battling academics, its feminists and young mothers, and Maura's own daughter Clare, who could well be the new incarnation of the Indian Mother Goddess.