A Clown in the Moonlight

This comic romance is set at a small bohemian liberal arts college in Vermont. Embarking on his first teaching job in a longed-for idyllic New England country setting, Richie Schuster’s marriage to snarky and glamorous wife, Sally, soon goes up in flames, along with his academic career as he declares war on his fellow faculty members. Contains many excellent farcial blackouts and sharp, Pinter-like dialogue.This was James Howard Kunstler’s second novel, published in 1981, some time before he became better known as a social critic and author of the acclaimed non-fiction books The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and Too Much Magic. Reviewers pilloried Kunstler as “just another unhappy divorced college professor writing about his sorry life,” but Kunstler had never taught school at any level and had never been married when he wrote the book.