Synopsis "The Professor Saith (in English)"
When Palo Alto car dealer Neil Bennington's nose is broken by an unidentified assailant, the enclave of Mancusoland in the San Francisco suburb of San Carlos is subjected to neighborhood speculation and police investigation. Bennington is dubbed "The Professor" by the readers of a community web journal, the Mancusoland Mouthpiece, because his commentaries cover everything from sports to philosophy. Some readers, like "Mo" Killeen, are irritated enough by Bennington's pronouncement to offer, when a police investigator asks about who might have done the deed, "there's a million people around here who wouldn't have minded taking a whack at him," while another think oppositely and deems a new work, "A pleasure to read and learn from." A complication arises when investigators discover that Neil roams Mancusoland regularly, and is enough of a friend of Vicki Boudreau, whose husband, Claude, by chance is a genuine professor at Stanford, to cause implication by some female residents that his prolonged visits to the Boudreau household, when Claude is at his academic pursuits, are less than innocent, - though the purpose of the sessions has been well-explained as an exercise in compiling favorite music in a situation where one researcher has a tone-deaf husband and the other an excellent wife with only slight interest in the transports of melody. Author Cherry characterizes The Professor Saith, his eleventh book, as a demi-novel because the Mouthpiece articles integral to the fiction are reflections of his real-world views analogous to the content of his three non-fiction books. Like the residents of tiny Mancusoland, readers of the demi-novel are likely to have opposing opinions on the propositions The Professor puts forth.
