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THROUGH A GLASS, LIGHTLY
John L’Heureux Speaks Up

By Diane Manuel

o how are his colleagues responding to John L’Heureux’s fictional depiction of an unnamed university that is a $41.11 cab ride from SFO, set in lion-colored foothills and approached by a long avenue of palm trees?

“It’s a little curious,” George Brown, professor of English, said after L’Heureux read from his new novel, The Handmaid of Desire, at the Stanford Bookstore shortly after it was published.

“There are people in the department who read the book and say to me, ‘I’m glad I’m not in there.’

“And I say, ‘You’re not?’

“I, of course, recognize myself among the ‘fools’ who teach literature.”

Brown has known L’Heureux since they were in graduate school together at Harvard University in the late 1960s.

“When he was a Jesuit, and when he was writing for the Atlantic, John always wrote with a satiric voice,” Brown said. “His view of life is a bit sharp.”

Martin Evans, professor of English, said The Handmaid of Desire gave him “a great deal of malicious joy.”

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