Mustang Sally

Meet Packard Schmidt, the most appealing and beleaguered academic antihero since Lucky Jim hung up his gown. Not for "Pack" Schmidt the cozy literary vacations in the Lake District. When the semester's work at Amherst College (of Indiana, that is) teaching English composition to the dismally undermotivated comes to a close, Pack marks his papers high (to avoid arguments) and is quickly out the door to his favorite place on earth: Las Vegas. There he leaves the world of comma splices and scrambled logic and the stifling political correctness of his department behind to become a plunger of sorts - "the Hero with a Thousand Dollars." A man of poetic sensibilities, Pack loves everything about the world of legalized gambling - the cheesy floor shows, the plentiful food, the recycled air, the action, the action, the action. And then it's back to the pedagogical grind, revivified and maybe even slightly enriched. On this trip, though, Pack has an errand: to return a late theme ("Things Happen in Pairs of Three") to his former student Sally Iverson, a "transfer" to UNLV and the daughter of his squash partner and colleague Frank Iverson. After a disconcerting encounter with Sally's roommates - which requires him to recite and explicate a Shakespeare sonnet through an intercom to prove his academic credentials - Pack discovers to his mingled delight and dismay that Sally has in fact transferred to the Mustang Valley Inn as an eager-to-learn hooker. Since her services are so cheerfully and insistently for hire - and since as a lonely divorce Pack's maintained a chaste crush on his student - he succumbs. And thus the whole post-Clarence Thomas universe begins inexorably to cave in on Pack'scheerfully seedy life. Once his indiscretion is discovered, the furies are set loose and every disaster known to academic man - white American heterosexual male, to be precise - befalls him. Cashiered and banished from pleasantly third-rate Amherst (of Indiana, that is), he must travel