Struldbruggs: The Life Everlasting

"Struldbruggs: The Life Everlasting" is the third and final volume of the Baloney U trilogy that began on a school trip with "Chaucer on the Nile," continued on campus in "Gloriana at Baloney U," and here concludes-shuffling on the edge of the abyss.In Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels," struldbruggs were humanlike creatures who live forever, but grow ever more vicious and grasping with each passing year. Recently retired emeritus professor George Badget, a widower, shares Swift's vision, seeing those around him living longer, but living increasingly dissolute, desperate lives-intent on staying young and looking up from the trough only occasionally to consider whether life has any larger meaning. As he moves into retirement without the stability of marriage, and the familiarity of his teaching and research routine, he becomes positively infatuated with a younger woman, Adelaide Myers, and, apparently, she with him. -Problem is, he's approaching seventy and she's barely eighteen. In the sight of God (and the neighbors), is there any way to make this thing work?Badget's attachment to Adelaide becomes the occasion for a personal search for insight: Although he becomes increasingly convinced that "everything" is not permitted, he struggles to reach an understanding of what is permitted: What is a morally good life in the present age? How should we live?For Adelaide, a good-looking and smart girl who comes from an environment where the lust for constant distraction and entertainment rules human behavior, the prospect of climbing out of the bathos, to live in a place bursting with brilliant stuff worth knowing, becomes an obsession: There must, she figures, be more to life than hustling, Hulu, and hook-ups.Badget and Adelaide's relationship is complicated by the attentions of a local police detective who is investigating a sexual-harassment complaint filed against Adelaide by the high-school principal, while concurrently probing things that don't add up in the death of Badget's wife, a school psychologist who died in a traffic accident on the way home from chaperoning the senior prom, more than a year earlier. Was she murdered, and if so, by whom?