Professor Romeo /

Philandering Harvard professor Jake Barker, nicknamed ``Professor Romeo,'' finds his career at risk after charges of sexual harassment. ``Bernays has in this bitterly ironic story captured many essential truths about the political and moral issues inside a university,'' wrote PW. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Bernays (The Address Book, 1983; The School Book, 1980; etc.) has always been good at exposing the tricky inner-workings of academic institutions--all those special, little social wheels that tick and turn and, occasionally, jam up. Here, she takes on a big wheel and a big deal (the place is Harvard, the topic is sexual harassment) and brings them down to size--in a wise and affecting novel that shows how many different ways there are to tell one truth. Jacob Barker, a tenured professor of psychology, has a reputation for brilliance, based largely on some inspired work he began as a graduate student. His other reputation-as a dedicated womanizer--began at the same time, but it's been more assiduously maintained. Barker simply cannot resist a pretty woman. And pretty women, it seems, are everywhere. They're his colleagues in the psych department. They're working in the publishing house where Barker goes for meetings about his new book. And, most of all, they're in the classroom. Day after day, they sit there, wearing tight jeans and licking their lips. What's a guy supposed to do? The real question, of course, is what a professor is supposed to do, and Bernays has endowed Barker with a wonderfully credible, willful naivet‚ on this point. Unable to view what he's been doing as an abuse of power, he insists that it's never one-sided. It's a bargain between the two of you."" When Barker faces his accusers--a particularly unlovely trio of former students who have lodged formal complaints with the university--it becomes clear that the whole matter of power and bargaining is complicated, and more than a little sleazy. What happens to the professor is both deserved and unjust. His story is the blackest of comedies, and the most oblique of tragedies. Bernays shoots for all the angles here and then hits--right into the darkest part of the heart. Bull's-eye. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.