The Essence of Nathan Biddle
Author: J. William Lewis
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group
Pages: 427
Price: $27.95 (Hardcover)
Retired Lawyer Writes Challenging, Philosophical Novel
“The Essence of Nathan Biddle” arrived with a gigantic press package—a long press release, exuberant pre-publication praise from a number of sources, and a very extensive interview with the author.
In a sense this ploy works. Seeing such effort, one feels obliged to give the book a try.
And I was not disappointed, exactly. This is an ambitious, serious novel, a novel Lewis can be proud of.
A retired tax attorney, now living in Shoal Creek, Lewis has been working on this manuscript for over 30 years, adding to it, like a bird building a nest. There is no predicting whether there will be a second novel from Mr. Lewis.
At 427 pages, it is indeed longer than it needs to be, but Lewis has a lot to say.
Holden Caulfield, protagonist of “The Catcher in the Rye,” has been perhaps America’s most famous angst-filled youngster. Salinger’s and Lewis’ novels are both set in the 1950s, but where Holden Caulfield was perhaps 14 or so, Lewis’ narrator/protagonist, Kit Biddle, is about to be a senior in a prep school much like Indian Springs.
He is a promising poet and very bright. His cousin Newt is very bright. His friend Lichtman is very bright. The girls in his life are very bright. The book is filled with smart talk about the brilliant and nearly impenetrable texts of existentialism: “Fear and Trembling,” “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” “The Myth of Sisyphus.” The discussants are teenagers, not philosophy professors and, no surprise, they don’t understand Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness.” Who does?
Nevertheless, they take this all too seriously and personally.
Is there a God? If so, why does He permit evil? What is the meaning of life? Why are we alive at all? Is it all meaningless? Kit’s father may have committed suicide. Are suicide, despair, nihilism the only sensible answers?
A compulsive reader and an obsessive thinker, Kit is overwhelmed by absurdity. Unlike Holden, who’s angry at a world he thought full of “phonies,” Kit sinks into existential despair.
These questions can drive a teenage mind crazy.
And crazy already runs in Kit’s family. Kit’s uncle, Nat, a charismatic preacher, hears the voice of God in his head. Like Abraham, he is called upon to sacrifice his own son, in this case named Nathan Biddle, not Isaac. If God asks, are we not obliged to obey? Uncle Nat ends up in Bryce.
THAT is sensational, granted. This book has some fine plot points—a teenage love story, Kit’s relationship to his track team coach and to his English teacher, marital infidelity among some of his friends’ parents—and some humor, but discussions of nothingness between characters who agree they do not understand what they are reading are not inherently dramatic. The novel of ideas, filled with brilliant talk—Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and others—is tough to pull off.
There are a couple of good moments where the boys construct original theorems.
For example, in terms of the opposite sex, the Biddle Lichtman theory of yearning holds that “the desirability of a thing is inversely proportional to its availability.”
In addition to the through-line of existentialism, whether existence precedes essence and what that means, there is a parallel line of Platonic Idealism gone toxic.
Kit is utterly infatuated with the gorgeous and brilliant Anna and thinks of her as PERFECT.
She is rightly distressed, overwhelmed, by this obsession and breaks up with him. The loss of what he sees as an Ideal Form is, for him, too much to bear. He spins out of control, becomes self-destructive.
About this time, Sarah, an equally splendid girl, appears, and she idealizes Kit, distressing him. He never realizes this is exactly what he had just been inflicting on Anna.
The cover of this book shows a great blue heron alone on a beach standing on one leg: Kit’s totem animal. As Kit progresses through psychotherapy, we learn that in a terrifically stupid move, he wrecked a truck and nearly lost a leg.
We also learn that, as fledglings in the nest, herons grow too large to feed but resist leaving and must be pushed over the edge by their parents, even though it is unknown if they are able to fly.
This is surely, the heart of the coming-of-age novel, and every parent’s fear.
Don Noble’s newest book is Alabama Noir, a collection of original stories by Winston Groom, Ace Atkins, Carolyn Haines, Brad Watson, and eleven other Alabama authors.
