Novemberfest

In Germany in 1953, a seventeen-year-old American soldier serving in the occupation falls in love for the first time - with the beautiful, war-torn country, and with a sophisticated (and married) woman. Thirty-five years later, the force of this enchantment has lifted Glen Cady from a bleak job on a Michigan assembly line into a world he never could have imagined as a young PFC. A professor of German literature at a small New Hampshire college, he is married, with a beloved daughter in nursery school, and presumably living the life of his dreams. But his devotion as a teacher, he now discovers, doesn't ensure tenure in an unpopular subject, or in an academic climate ruled by strident personal politics. At the same time, his age and suddenly uncertain prospects make him suspect, in the eyes of his wife, as both husband and father. Winter is closing in around him, along with these brutal realizations, and Glen gradually, irresolutely, succumbs to the advances of one of his students, a young woman estranged from her own marriage. While their affair rekindles his youthful exuberance, it also jeopardizes even further the life he has so painstakingly invented for himself. And just as the Berlin Wall comes down - forever transforming the country he once knew - he must relive those long-ago days in Germany when he learned the glorious pain of love and its loss. In this rapidly changing world, Glen Cady makes his embattled way toward redemption by reconciling, at last, his past and present with the future. And with Novemberfest, Theodore Weesner has written an expansive, deeply moving novel in which the wonder of middle age is measured with bittersweet wisdom against the passions of youth.