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Karen Pelletier, on tenure track at prestigious Enfield College in Western Mass is teaching Poe to her Freshman Humanities class. One student, Mike Vitale, stands out. He's very unusual in that he is willing to express his own views and he thinks! There are the usual suspects. Professor Elliot Corbin has written a treatise on Poe as a transvestite and is angling for the prestigious Palaver Chair, which has been vacant since the last occupant died. Monica Cassale is the department secretary, a very strange, unfriendly, secretive woman. Karen's friend, the young sociology professor Jill Greenberg is on maternity leave, but Earlene Johnson, the Dean of Students is still around and so is Harriet Person of women's studies, visiting poet Jane Birdwort, and Amber Nichols, graduate assistant who would kill for a permanent tenure track teaching position. Just before Thanksgiving break, UPS delivers a large box to Karen. When she opens it, with help from all the department it seems, she finds a collection of papers attributable to Emmeline Foster, a 19th century poet who died in 1845, her body found floating in the Hudson River, supposedly having killed herself because of her unrequited love for Edgar Allan Poe. Karen puts everything back in the box, but notices that a small leather bound journal, containing finished poems in manuscript, has disappeared, but Thanksgiving is coming and she has other things to do. Lt. Piotrowski interrupts the jollity of Thanksgiving dinner at Karen's cottage with the announcement that Monica found Corbin, dead in his study, with Karen's name written on a blood spattered yellow pad. Then Karen's office is ransacked, and the Foster journals disappear. And, as if Pelletier isn't suffering from enough angst, her daughter, Amanda, announces that she is going to go to Lowell to look for the father that abandoned Karen and Amanda so many years before. As usual, Dobson manages to puncture academic pomposity, as when she asks Amber how is her section of FroshHum going and Amber answers "Of course bourgeois ideology in the neocanonical curriculum lends itself with particular immediacy to the deconstruction afforded by postmodernist pedagogy" and Karen answers "Well, That's good... As for me, I'm totally swamped. All those papers to grade" In THE RAVEN AND THE NIGHTINGALE, Pelletier finally reconciles herself to the loss of her long time lover, Tony, now married with fatherhood impending, and, with Amanda's urging, starts trying to reconcile herself with her family, who threw her out when her marriage dissolved so many years earlier, as well as helping the police to solve another crime. The obvious Poe poem for Dobson to have made the focus of this novel would have been BELLS, since it was the bells of Fordham College that annoyed Poe, instead, she chose THE RAVEN
Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, April 2003
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