Our Story
by
Lawrence Abby Gauthier
ace reporter
The Westphalia Periodic News
December 21, 2023
The Novel, A Life
The Novel
I’ve started to work on my novel again, like looking up an old friend. Like I don’t already have enough to do! – running a publishing company; editing a collection of stories by children of the greatest generation; running around in Denver traffic for a place that still plugs and patches a tire with a small nail in it, or carries spares. Then the website develops a glitch. Christmas shopping. Bethlehem under siege. Wrapping paper. Running to Walgreen’s for Scotch tape. Negotiating the medical system. Remembering passwords. And our kitchen is a busy place, too. There’s just the two of us in our modest suburban home with a big fenced-in back yard next to a park -- my wife, Culley Jane, the retired professor, and me. But we rarely eat out, not that we can’t afford it, but we feel better when we eat what we cook, maybe a still active instinct, or nostalgia. Like in the 50s. I think the first time my folks took me out for a sit-down dinner in a restaurant was for my 16th birthday. Father worked in a factory, hunted and coached Little League. Mother was always busy in the kitchen.
So, rationally, I don’t have the time to be getting back to my novel. I’ve been writing it for fifty years and it keeps growing like "The Blob" in the horror flick going off the trail in unpredictable directions. I haven’t worked on it, or looked at it for over nine months, ever since I committed myself to writing a weekly column on top of everything else.
I think Hemingway once said before he shot himself that there are no young novelists, but only young poets because the hardest part of a novel is living it.
If he didn’t say that exactly, it’s the kind of thing he would say.
But I’m once again starting to feel the draw, like to the Sirens of Titan.
The main character in the novel has always been Benny, Benjamin T. Profante. In the beginning, he dreamed of what he’d say as they handed him the Prize, the Pearl, a Pulitzer maybe… maybe a spot on the Johnny Carson Show. But the plot kept changing. He gets exiled. Becomes an over-the-road trucker. Retires. Meets a retired professor on a dating site and lives a busy life.
