The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Handmaid of Desire by John L'Heureux
James DeRossitt

John L’Heureux. The Handmaid of Desire. Soho, 1996. 264 pp. $23.00.

John L’Hueureux’s exceedingly clever novel of academic life is set in the English department of an unnamed California university. It’s a place of tricks and schemes run amok, where the theory-obsessed Young Turks are on the ascendant and the Fools, the professors “still lost in literature,” are considered hopelessly out of touch. There’s a plot afoot to turn the English Department in the Department of Theory and Discourse, “which would take on the author’s reputation or the western canon or the nature of the writing itself—whether it was Flaubert’s Bovary or a 1950 tax form or the label on a Campbell’s soup can.” Into the fray walks Olga Kominska, a woman of indeterminate European origins and a sly genius for social, professional, and psychosexual manipulation. Olga is ambitious and sexy, with a taste for “highly athletic sex,” and she has written several acclaimed books of theory. She enters the department with distinct—but mysterious—ambitions. She wants to write a book about power and “the folly of answered prays.” As the novel unfolds, we see Olga using various members of the department for her own murky ends. We meet graduate student Peter Peeks, “young and sturdy and beautiful and empty,” who serves as the depart-ment’s “surrogate stud”; the chubby, befuddled Francis Xavier Tortorisi, whose wafer-thin experimental novels mirror his sexual impotence; Eleanor Tuke, a professor who aspires to become “the Larry King of the literati”; Robbie Richter, a theorist who suffers a nervous breakdown and becomes convinced of the genius of Franklin W. Dixon, author of the Hardy Boys series. Olga tries to find a destiny for everyone—but only, she’d say, “up to a point.”

What’s best about this book is the wickedly funny way L’Heureux juggles the flashy buzzwords of the literary academy. Written with a radiant humor and filled with fine details—the “penile hegemony” of the university administration, the cabal of “post-Christian feminists,” the obsession with Barthes and Foucault—this novel shows that L’Heureux has his finger on the wildly racing pulse of the modern academy. [James DeRossitt]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction The Handmaid of Desire by John L'Heureux James DeRossitt John L’Heureux. The Handmaid of Desire. Soho, 1996. 264 pp. $23.00. John L’Hueureux’s exceedingly clever novel of academic life is set in the English department of an unnamed California university. It’s a place of tricks and schemes run amok, where the theory-obsessed Young Turks are on the ascendant and the Fools, the professors “still lost in literature,” are considered hopelessly out of touch. There’s a plot afoot to turn the English Department in the Department of Theory and Discourse, “which would take on the author’s reputation or the western canon or the nature of the writing itself—whether it was Flaubert’s Bovary or a 1950 tax form or the label on a Campbell’s soup can.” Into the fray walks Olga Kominska, a woman of indeterminate European origins and a sly genius for social, professional, and psychosexual manipulation. Olga is ambitious and sexy, with a taste for “highly athletic sex,” and she has written several acclaimed books of theory. She enters the department with distinct—but mysterious—ambitions. She wants to write a book about power and “the folly of answered prays.” As the novel unfolds, we see Olga using various members of the department for her own murky ends. We meet graduate student Peter Peeks, “young and sturdy and beautiful and empty,” who serves as the depart-ment’s “surrogate stud”; the chubby, befuddled Francis Xavier Tortorisi, whose wafer-thin experimental novels mirror his sexual impotence; Eleanor Tuke, a professor who aspires to become “the Larry King of the literati”; Robbie Richter, a theorist who suffers a nervous breakdown and becomes convinced of the genius of Franklin W. Dixon, author of the Hardy Boys series. Olga tries to find a destiny for everyone—but only, she’d say, “up to a point.” What’s best about this book is the wickedly funny way L’Heureux juggles the flashy buzzwords of the literary academy. Written with a radiant humor and filled with fine details—the “penile hegemony” of the university administration, the cabal of “post-Christian feminists,” the obsession with Barthes and Foucault—this novel shows that L’Heureux has his finger on the wildly racing pulse of the modern academy. [James DeRossitt]

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