Each novel features a heterosexual male around thirty obsessed with reflecting on past and just-passed events or interchanges, thereby convincing himself he has become more aware, maybe enlightened--he thinks so because of "discovered," quasi-touchstone principles he articulates not as well as the first or famous who did so. The distant past does not figure in retrospections except to suggest each "hero" should take a more careful look to see what if anything is really there to deal with, or that figures in who he is now.
The protagonists encounter in the course of their days people, mostly women, who intrigue and interest them, finding in the end that the most human among the women is the logical choice for deeper involvement. They, our heroes, abandon, for the most part, contacts with friends and girlfriends. Each is both predator and predatee and can't decide what or who to blame for acts and impulses they feel. Each suspects hormones, or whatever other physiological chimera to point to as excuse for never-outrageous yet to each extraordinary moments.
Each protagonist is drawn to beauty in people and places but they reveal little of their own attractiveness that others seem to find in them. Each thinks his some measure of sweeter-than-thou kindness, un-realistic openness and restraint, and hyper-protestant earnestness will save him, and the world? but salvation from what they don't seem to know. Each is subject to emotional setbacks, but return to persist in moral-like behavior without religious affiliation or other anchor.
Both characters find themselves in featureless rural towns in the western U.S. as newcomers starting again. They are prone to make observations about people and places that over time must be revised. Although work or career figure into plot progression, the stories are more about working through relationships and discovering each's identity. The importance of friendship and older, more experienced characters figure in both accounts. Eating and drinking at bars and restaurants provide settings for forgetting, avoiding, and superficial connecting. Each describes what he sees in details corresponding to needs and wants, including limitations because of age and stage of life. There is little notice or judgment as to gender or race or other demographic characteristics. Also, there is no violence or unpleasant character that the protagonists need encounter.
The titles for each work are telling in the use of the indefinite pronoun. Thus the tentative nature of things, uncertainties, unknowns pervade life as each character lives it. People somehow struggle through, evidentially revealing their essential goodness, and that is a foundation for acceptance and love to be valued in the end.
Enough already--thus to say in effect the two books are more the same than different. The experiment to create a second novel different from the first has failed, although one story might be more literary than the other (meta-fictional), or more interesting to follow the short journey to its conclusion (testosterone drives choice among three or four mate-material candidates).
This blog has been to sort me out. At the outset, I left that to the reader, should there be one, thinking that if interested:
Here is a bunch of stuff. People are complex. Now, see if you can get a picture of who is talking here. I hope you find in the process something interesting or entertaining or both. Or, please agree or disagree with me.As evidence for sorting myself out, given that I gave the time and focus to what I have posted thus far, this post could be along the lines of,
Hey, I figured something out, that the so-called novels I was playing with also during this process, artificial things that they are, are just stories from flow states, or the recorded up-wellings from somewhere inside me. End of story and stories. They are as reflections or propaganda, not what I would have had them be, things outside myself to hold up and contemplate. Works of an impersonal nature, not reflections of my deeper self.I was wrong.
Writing for no audience proves instructive again. I am okay having come this far, but there is yet something more to be learned, and harder work to be done . . . to create and discover a truth or two without artifice.
In view of this milestone, it will be soon time to shut this blog down and let the next project take me to, please, a different and less navel-gazing posture.
Yet, it's been fun and challenging.
