The Dean's December

The Dean's December

Saul Bellow

#3289 of 8,085 books · #1628 in Fiction

Shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction (1982).

After being widely portrayed as a virulent racist and a traitor to his city, Professor Albert Corde, dean of the faculty of Journalism, is forced to leave Chicago. Corde is ill-equipped to handle the outrage that faces him, both as the author of several articles on Chicago's endemic corruption, and as an outspoken figure in the controversial trial of two black men charged with killing a white student. Travelling to Bucharest to visit his ailing mother-in-law, he is unable to escape the comparisons in his mind between the corrupt and dehumanizing aspects of the communist regime, and the abandoned streets of his home city. Meditating on the juxtaposition between two distant worlds, and obsessing over events that begin to unfold both in Chicago and Bucharest, he begins to concede defeat. In this tormented tale, amid the swirling forces that threaten to drown his humanity, Corde slides ever closer to the brink of desolation.