Novel excerpt: "He mostly did not think of Turkey, think of Grace, think of Jacob. He mostly did not think there was anything that he could do about any of it. James had lost himself once, having been deprived of fatherhood and deprived of a choice in the matter. On the shores of Lake Van, eight time zones from every last place he would ever call home, James Gutensohn Jr. learned that it had all been for naught – for naught had he lost his mind at the loss of a son, a son who in fact was living, living somewhere on this earh they both shared, had been living all along. He had loved the mother of that child. But Grace Anne Spice, collector of jars, had broken his heart thrice. Once when she decided to give up and did not ask if he would give up too. Once when she changed her mind and hid it from him. And once again, when she disappeared at Owen Prater’s revelation to her, that the web of lies was now a coin of truth. It was a revelation that was frightening, and it was a revelation that was dangerous - for at last, everyone knew the truth. When the truth turns out to be that, in fact, a web of decent souls have been guided, and for so long, by a web of lies, the coin of truth threatens the wealth of the deceitful. The coin of truth is a currency that enriches honest souls and bankrupts the remaining. For James, the truth was neither threat nor relief, nor even all that altering. For James, the currency of truth had bought this world one more child, who walked the ground that he tread too, and miraculously, he and that child shared not only this world, but shared too the very bits of matter, signals, information, and every type of portion elsewise, which give us access to this world, and make us who we are, as long as we are in it. He carried this with him every day, just as he had carried the loss that was a lie. But what James decided, from that moment at Lake Van, from that moment of discovery most profound – from that moment onward, he resolved that the child she’d named Jacob knew his mother as Grace, and his father as Owen. There was no one on this Earth whom James loved than the man whom Jacob called his father. James had no desire to change that, for his love of Owen Prater was Everests greater than his love of the truth - that Jacob was his by blood. And that kind of love, thought James, which he had for Owen – that is the truth that he would want to live in. It’s best, he thought, we leave the other truth alone."
Posted on: Sat, 06 Jul 2013 00:39:19 +0000
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