Title: The handmaid of desire
First published: 1996
Description: It is impossible to read The Handmaid of Desire without laughing out loud - the funniest novel about the petty ambitions of academics since Randall Jarrell's Pictures From an Institution. It is wonderfully merciless, taking no prisoners from amongst the self-congratulatory, self-referential, and self-absorbed intellectuals.

They are wicked and hilarious, especially Olga Kominska - the vain feminist theorist - who is newly arrived and instantly enlisted by Zachary Kurtz to deconstruct the English Department. (When not secretly reading novels - for pleasure - Kurtz schemes his colleagues' downfall, and his ascendancy.).

Olga Kominska: beautiful, brilliant, a chameleon with foreign accents that come and go, seems to have strange, mysterious powers. Olga promises to give the various scholars and writers whom she has come among "whatever they want." "But beware of answered prayers," she warns. No one heeds her: and so she proceeds to fulfill all their desires - up to a point.

As politically incorrect as they come, and full of human foibles and fumbling sex, The Handmaid of Desire has something to offend everyone. This is John L'Heureux's funniest book: satire just this side of tragedy.
Subjects: Fiction, Study and teaching, English philology, Universities and colleges, College teachers, English teachers, Departments, California, fiction
Places: California
LC classification: PS3562.H4 H36 1996