BRIEF CANDLEProfessor Jake Boswell, a Victorian born in America during the Jazz Age, discovers that he is deeply in love with a trailerhouse girl. This comes after thirty years of good behavior and marriage to the same woman. Finally, at the top of the academic ladder, Jake finds himself facing two enormous problems: at home a wife who has become a dipsomaniac and at work an endless wave of young liberated college retreads. His wife, Lola, once a lovely and charming companion, has become a migraine disaster; but even so, if Heather Roberts had stayed in her trailerhouse with her two kids and her beer-guzzling and guitar-playing husband, he would (more than likely ) have stayed in the rut he had dug for himself. Part of the blame might also be shared by the politicians in Washington who thought up the idea of paying young mothers stuck in trailershouses to go back to college to learn something besides how to have babies.
| 
Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It's a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. |
