https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/theodore-james-putala/a-hero-for-our-time/

I like this review.  It's completely right, I'm sure, about its lackings as a novel.  It is, I find, perfect.  It speaks of the work's amateur quality and tedious reading conditions.  The author is, admittedly, too much of an asshole to go to enough writer workshops and learn the necessary craft.

One small issue here is the nuance of understanding suggested by Jamie's father's suggestion 'that a college can be a place for vocational training.'  This is not, I think, the same as the full passage's emphasis as it is in the original text.  The discussion is more about emphasizing the dreams, the callings a liberal arts education reveal, which only in turn point to a vocation later on.  It's curious to me that the reviewer, paid for his or her services, saw it this way, or rather, chose to ignore the import of what's being addressed here.  Maybe it's too wild and offbeat a point to even register in such circles.  (If the passage is pontification, I apologize.)

Well, perhaps I am splitting hairs here puzzling over this.  Or maybe the reviewer is offering a psychological interpretation the author was not consciously aware of in rendering, actually remembering, original dialogue of real life.  Anyway, makes me wonder whether someone may have missed the gist of it.  To that person, it may well have seemed to lack a plot, but that's not really how I see it.

Could the review come from a certain bias toward the place of art in the economy?  Looking at the Kirkus website, and a subsequent email from them pitching their marketing services, it becomes clearer that this is about advertising (well, duh), advertising that which is sellable.  The book here is regarded as a service, a product like soap is a product, a service of entertainment or a certain kind of easy erudition.  Well, that is publishing for you, a business, not a charity, these days.

Though we really do not question the market, but rather try to get along with it and hopefully please it so that it rewards us, I wonder if, perhaps, we should.  We could take a step back from it, even if that seems at first like a futile and fruitless endeavor.  It is, of course, thoroughly pervasive, its reach everywhere, as now everything has an authoritative value placed upon it.  The beast which we fed because it facilitated the all-important movement and exchange of goods, has overgrown us, become a kind of Big Brother, all of us falling in.

I tried to write a book about a rare place where that hadn't completely happened yet, a place where thought was independent, suited more toward higher purposes.  I put this place as a college campus, not a bad place after all.  The stakes involved matters of the heart, and so I do see a plot.  Sure, maybe I was a fool to set my flagpole there, for being not in the slightest bit practical, which is of course always helpful to a cause.  But, as JFK said once, 'art establishes the basic human truths,' (though in our time we are a bit too nervously deconstructionist to allow ourselves embracing that.)  Yes, it would have been smarter to play along with the forces that be, and then once comfortably situated then go about it, but, such is life.

A work is a piece of fiction, by the way, as any remembering of actual events is a recreation, a reimagining, an act of interpretation and also poetry.  The author is merely trying to portray actual events (while changing the names to protect the innocent and those whose privacy must be respected) in such a way as to make some sense of them, selfish as that may be.  The effort was not to make a book for the marketplace, not at all, really.  The creation of it had its own reasons.

Yes, I'm for questioning that which runs roughshod over humanity, which paves over the town it has killed to build roads to endless malls with the same big players everywhere, which pollutes the air and water, which takes habitat and makes endless sub-divisions which then sit there to rot, unoccupied.  Yes, it may seem like Quixotic tilting at windmills (an oddly prescient understanding about how we would all one day become slaves to energy needs), but the marketplace cannot factor in everything as much as it might claim to.  The cost of corporate pollution is passed on and on, for example.  McDonalds makes their money, kids health suffers, diabetes becomes pandemic, hobbling a work force, disposable containers pile up in dumps...

The same market place attaches value on people.  I, for instance, from market standpoint, and simply a bartender, true, a bit of wine knowledge thrown in, but paid basically the same as a dishwasher.  Dick Cheney, near the other end of the scale, deep into energy concerns, has a completely different, and larger, value.  Some question the market, others go straight to figuring out how to make it work for them and oftentimes 'the hell with everyone else, grab what you can and then retreat behind high walls.'  It's just a matter of attitude, of values, of the way the soul bids one to be 'a better person' however you might define it.



I don't know.  Sometimes, I feel like I'm missing something in life.  End of the week, down to the Whole Foods, too poor to eat out, the usual routine.  Logan Circle buzzing with Thursday night, bars and restaurants full, everyone dressed well, and I'm headed back to the quiet little street above Dupont Circle to cook dinner.  Up late unwinding after work the night before, I got up around 1, and don't feel like joining in quite yet.  The day had its stuff:  Took the cat in for her steroid shot, then the groceries, but aside from yoga I haven't gotten in the exercise I need.  And a weird aloneness, the kind you can't get out of, has quickly set in, now that I am back.  It's been so long since I've been a part of dating life, I don't think I even want to bother with it anymore anyway, such has been my experience.  I don't feel good enough about my own place in life anyway to be very entertaining.  And I am too poor anyway.  Stay home, cook my piece of fish, do some house cleaning, take the recycling out, get rid of some newspaper piles.  Have I become a nihilist, or a sort of anarchist, not caring about anything?  Am I just beat from the week?  Maybe it's the staying in, bad for the energy levels.  And all of this does indeed come across as being written by someone who seems to be outside the market, outside at least the market that dating in modern times is, as one small example.

I think we get down as a way of looking within, to find that meaning, that higher meaning we intuitively sense ourselves grasping for.  One has a need of a transformative understanding of what he does in life.  A barman, presiding over only the happiest of times?  Or a kind of non-denominational theosophical sort of priest, maybe despite the serving, and over serving, of wine.  My father understood my book to be the story of a fledgling theosophist, of one who cares and thinks deeply, probably a bit way too self-conscious to be part of the fun all of the time.  I think that makes sense.

Grasping to find, looking for, our real selves, we might naturally feel a little depressed.  As we've let down people for not being fully and firmly that which we would like to be.  And it is sad to realize that the pleasure-seeking self is not what makes us content.  And, contrary to the societal image, maybe happiness is not found so much in the smiling joyous crowd, but alone, sifting through things that might even be a little painful.  Ouch.  I need that time to go off by myself and ride a bike by a stream.  Is that just a pose?  Are you looking in the wrong place for happiness?  After all, the story goes, we are social animals.  Just go out and be social and you should be able to find some kind of happiness, no?

Hmm, I don't so often think so.  Things are more horrid than that.  But in realism, one finds peace.