Novemberfest (Electronic book text)

In Germany in 1953, a 17-year old American soldier serving in the occupation falls in love for the first time-with the beautiful, war-torn country, and with a sophisticated (and married) woman. Thirty-five years later, the force of this enchantment has lifted Glen Cady from a bleak job on a Michigan assembly line into a world he never could have imagined as a young PFC. A professor of German literature at a small New Hampshire college, he is married, with a beloved daughter in nursery school, and presumably living the life of his dreams. But his devotion as a teacher, he now discovers, doesn't ensure tenure in an unpopular subject, or in an academic climate ruled by strident personal politics. And his age and suddenly uncertain prospects make him suspect, in the eyes of his wife, as both husband and father. As winter and these brutal realizations close in on him, Glen gradually succumbs to a student's advances. While their affair rekindles his youthful exuberance, it also jeopardizes even further the life he has so painstakingly invented.
With Novemberfest, first published in 1994, Theodore Weesner crafts an expansive, deeply moving novel in which the wonder of middle age is measured with bittersweet wis-dom against the passions of youth. How Glen comes to deal with the specters of his past and the realities of his present yields a tender, evocative tale of desire, fears, remembrance, and regeneration.