A New Novel

Your attention, please, all who love literary fiction, especially publishers and agents.

My first novel, Sweetheart of the Lonesome Boulevard, is nearing completion.

Sweetheart of the Lonesome Boulevard is the picaresque story of Michael “Dorf” Dorfmann, as he matures from callow adolescence, through grief-embittered middle age, to his discovery of redemption in his own ‘lonesomeness.’ In this journey from youth to full adulthood, Dorf, a sensitive man with a self-conscious sense of integrity, seeks to comprehend the mysteries in the lives of those around him, hoping thereby to find his own place in the complex web of human relationships. In each of the novel’s four sections, he encounters Brenda Magarsczyk, a young woman with mystifying dark eyes. Despite the years that pass between these encounters, despite the fact that Brenda proves amazingly adept at changing her appearance, name, and occupation, Dorf always recognizes her and, in her, his own yearning to belong to something greater than himself. Brenda sometimes affirms, more often challenges, Dorf’s understanding of his identity and of the meaning of his quest.

Subplots and enigmas abound among the other people who touch Dorf’s and one another’s lives: an alcoholic record dealer who spouts a peculiar mixture of wisdom and nonsense, a painfully self-enclosed schoolteacher who longs to revive ancient paganism, a sexually predatory Gospel singer, a mortician who collects paintings, a beautiful but emotionally crippled Vietnamese émigré, a Jew-baiting clergyman, a 19th century frontiersman, and the megalomaniacal owner of a Christian radio station, interrupt Dorf’s first-person narrative to reveal things that Dorf does not, indeed cannot, know. Despite his imperfect understanding, their impact on Dorf’s life shines through in his formative experiences: the flood that ravages his home town, the fire that destroys a precious art collection, a fall down a mine, and the intrigues of a political campaign that compromise his closely-guarded integrity. His journey takes him to a thriving city and a bleak mining community, but he always returns to the Boulevard that traverses his home town of River Isle, where he sees, in the seemingly aimless back-and-forth movement of vehicles, the symbol of his own lonesomeness.

Though its plot sprawls in complicated interweavings, Sweetheart is driven primarily by the development of characters and the complexity of relationships among them. This complexity itself forms the major theme. Paradoxically, it is only by owning the lonesomeness of the Boulevard within himself that Dorf discovers the redemptive power of the vast web of human connectedness. The counter-theme of social, cultural, or moral intolerance--manifested by several characters--represents a false and inadequate way of belonging to the human community, for it tears the fabric of life into disconnected fragments. With her magical transformations and unnerving amorality, Brenda patches the fragments back together. It is Dorf’s recognition of her almost divine role that enables him to accept his own place as one traveler, among countless others, on the lonesome Boulevard.

If you are interested in knowing more, please contact me here at blogspot.

Thank you.
David P. Van