Mustang Sally

A sexual scandal that unseats a college professor is the focus of this occasionally titillating but mostly unappetizing satire. Recently divorced, English professor Packard (Pack) Schmidt frequents strip joints near the campus of Amherst College in Indiana (``. . . a bullshit university that doesn't even know what state it's supposed to be in . . .''), gazes longingly at the pert sorority girls who crowd his easy-A composition class and flies to Las Vegas now and then on gambling junkets. On one trip, he responds to the request of a troubled father and searches for one of his former students, the voluptuous Sally Iverson, who transferred to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, then disappeared. Sally turns up at a bordello called the Mustang Valley Inn, where Pack predictably lives out his fantasy by bedding her for a fee. Discovery of the affair leads the sad-sack professor to resign his job in shame, and an over-the-top denouement displays the narrator's mordant disdain for the culture of political correctness. Allen ( Straight Through the Night ) has a knack for precise description, but the resulting flood of details slows the book's unlikely plot. ( Nov. )