Albert Corde is a professor of journalism and dean of students at a Chicago university. He and his wife Minna travel to Bucharest Romania where Minna?s mother has suffered a stroke and is lying semiconscious in the local state hospital. As Corde tries to adapt to life in his mother-in-law?s small apartment and cope with her relations and friends news filters through to him of problems he left behind in Chicago: one of his students has been murdered and a series of articles he is writing offends powerful and influential Chicagoans he had thought of as friends. Gradually it becomes clear that Corde?s trip abroad is more than a brief interlude in a calm and orderly life and that nothing will ever be the same again. Witty and erudite The Dean?s December will be a delight to fans of Saul Bellow.
