Book excerpt: Brief Candle is a humorous biographical fiction about an English professor coming to terms with a mid-life crisis. Jake Boswell, a Victorian born in America during the Jazz Age, discovers that he is deeply in love with a trailerhouse girl. This comes after thirty years of good behavior and marriage to the same woman. Finally at the top of the academic ladder, Jake finds himself facing two enormous problems: at home a wife who has become a dipsomaniac and at work an endless wave of young liberated retreads. Lola, once a lovely and charming companion, has become a migraine disaster; but even so, if Heather Roberts had stayed in her trailerhouse with her two kids and her beer-guzzling and guitar-playing husband, he would (more than likely) have stayed in the rut he had dug for himself. Part of the blame might also be shared by the politicians in Washington who thought up the idea of paying young mothers stuck in trailerhouses to go back to college to learn something besides how to have babies.