Visiting Professor: A Novel of Chaos » (Bargain)

Since he began publishing spy fiction in 1973, Robert Littell has evolved into one of the most consistently interesting espionage novelists of the modern era. We asked the author to share some of his experiences -- and his favorite books -- with us.

Lemuel Falk, "a Russian theoretical chaoticist on the lam from terrestrial chaos," has been applying for permission to leave Russia every year for the past twenty-three years. Because he knows state secrets, he has not been allowed to cross the state's frontiers. Now, suddenly, his request for an exit visa is approved -- a sure sign that the situation is even more chaotic than he had imagined.

Falk accepts a chair as a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Chaos-Related Studies in upstate New York. Arriving in the Promised Land under the impression that the streets are paved with Sony Walkmans, he plunges into the heart of another kind of chaos. No sooner has he arrived than he sets off on an academic cat fight, falls in love with a hairdresser half his age, and becomes a self-styled gumshoe tracking a serial killer.

In one of his most original novels, Littell explores the relationships between randomness and God, chaos and sex, a butterfly tattoo and occasional rain, the going and the getting there. The Visiting Professor is a delicious post-Cold War romp through a chaotic contemporary America.

Publishers Weekly

Forsaking his customary thriller territory, Littell ( The Revolutionist ) here finds fertile new ground in the farther reaches of mathematics, which prove a wellspring of rich and consistently surprising comedy. When Lemuel Falk, a Russian ``theoretical chaoticist on the lam from terrestrial chaos,'' arrives to take up his visiting fellowship at Backwater University, he is immediately confronted by a blizzard of Americana: is it absolute confusion or, as Lemuel suspects, merely ``fool's randomness''--the facade of disorder behind which lurks a pure meaning? Many turn to him for the answer: a dope-smoking Orthodox rabbi seeking ``the chaos at the heart of the heart of the Torah,'' a libidinous female barber named Occasional Rain, and a multinational throng of spooks and spies all seeking to use Lemuel's mathematical genius for their encryption programs. A not-quite-innocent abroad fleeing Stalinist ghosts, the professor quests across the spiraling chaos of the American landscape, becoming in succession or in combination a lover, theologian, political protestor, media celebrity, homicide investigator and, finally, a refugee in the deceptively tranquil aisles of the local E-Z Mart. Littell's fast-paced satire is by turns bawdy, cerebral and touching. (Mar.)