FWIW, AYWTP Revealed

More than one reader has asked about the organization and meanings behind the novel, “Are You With The Program?” [AYWTP]

I have procrastinated, putting off any thoughts I have held about considering answering that question. After all, the humor disappears when one has to explain a joke.

In any case, while driving from my parents’ upper east Tennessee house to the domicile of my mother in-law late Thursday evening, I played around with the idea that maybe the world hasn’t come to an end after major U.S. financial institutions collapsed like stick-and-stilt houses in Galveston, Texas, during Hurricane Ike (e.g., Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and AIG, to name a few of the stalwart companies finding themselves shorted out of existence by bigger players in the international market – has NYC completely lost its financial center luster and/or has the U.S. seen history repeated in that military strength means little in protecting the virtual world (intrinsic stock value, debt, etc.)? Thank goodness the U.S. still has value as a major consumerist society.). If so, then my desire for mystery surrounding my writing will survive even if I give away some of the secrets of my last published novel. I drove past “photo enforced” speed limit zones in Mt. Carmel, and porpoised across the peaks and troughs of the road through Church Hill, with a rhythmic chant of “Three, one, two, four” rattling in my mind, keeping me awake at midnight.

Why the sequence, 3-1-2-4? Well, AYWTP has four sections but the chronology, such as it is, twists a little. The novel opens with section three of the superficial, chronological order of the story, then goes back to the first section, progresses to the second, jumps to the fourth and final section, and finally leads to the epilogue.

On the surface, AYWTP reveals the “Walter Mitty” escapist mindset of the main character, Bruce Colline. Unlike Thurber’s tale relating the fantasies of Mitty, however, Bruce’s takes place in a Jorge Luis Borges’ labyrinthine world with Swiftian-style parables right out of Gulliver’s Travels. Literally and figuratively, Bruce finds himself trapped in a labyrinth. The reader follows Bruce as he slips and slides down dead-end allies, backtracks to what seems like the main path, steps in and out of time, and finally uses his sense of smell to seek out the monetary reward of retirement at the other end of the rat race maze in which he’d wandered for years. Along the way, he encounters mini-societies, subcultures and individuals whose rules for living seem preposterous to general readers because of their absurdities but represent a distorted sense of reality that only (AND truly) makes sense to those who’ve lived it (and those who’ve lived it have told me they know exactly which scenes in AYWTP are nearly word-for-word retellings of their peculiar lives).

One easy example of the parallel to Gulliver’s Travels: while Gulliver found himself tied down by Lilliputians, Bruce found himself bound by a mechanical spider.

In an unintended “art imitates art” moment (ars imitatia artis?), I seem to have copied the style of Cervantes with the opening pages of reviews, both real and imagined, in AYWTP. I suppose all novelists owe their existence to the works of Cervantes, even if they don’t know it.

So, too, I owe a debt of gratitude to Gabriel García Márquez, whose novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” told me that the ghost stories, urban legends and tall tales of my youth about folks in the southeastern United States varied little from similar fables in other parts of the world, including Ireland and Columbia.

AYWTP also satirizes business books such as “The 4-Hour Workweek.” In fact, the working title for AYWTP was “The Four-Tablet Workweek,” but I decided the working title limited the scope of the story.

More could be said. I hope that this blog entry answers the main questions my readers have posed concerning AYWTP. If not, I’ll consider expanding the explanation at some future date, maybe even in this lifetime. Otherwise, my body is tired and I feel scatterbrained at 2:00 a.m. – with no current Internet access, I’ll have to fact-check and post this blog entry sometime later today. Good night and good morning to you, my faithful readers.