The quixotic, labyrinthine search for love is the subject of this latest novel by Snyder (Fallen Angel
, etc.), in which a college professor struggles to find his romantic destiny after meeting and losing the woman of his dreams. Sweet, shy, golf-obsessed Ross Lansdale survives a lonely childhood in an Illinois orphanage to land a job as an English professor at a Massachusetts state college. Ross's life seems complete when he falls for Julia Peterson, a comely Smith student, but Julia has promised herself to a young soldier named Jack, who is stationed in Germany during the Vietnam War. She eventually succumbs to her attraction to Ross, then gets pregnant and vanishes from his life. Shattered by the experience, Ross falls into an equally problematic entanglement after he is befriended by handsome Johnny Durocher, a hot young writer and ace golfer who has just ridden a well-received first novel into a teaching position in Ross's department. The combination of Johnny's writer's block and his guilt over injuring his sister in a car accident in which he was driving renders Johnny virtually unable to function, much to the dismay of his beautiful wife, Linda, who turns to Ross for help in caring for the couple's children. At the novel's surprising, elegiac conclusion, Ross journeys to Scotland to play a round of golf in Johnny's honor, and finally learns what happened to Julia. The golf writing sits uneasily with the romance, and Snyder often swerves into sentimentality, but some deft writing about love and loss provides crucial ballast. (Mar.)
