It is September 1982, and I arrive at my work-study job in the library at the State University of New York at Binghamton. My boss is a bent over petite Italian lady who usually does not give me a second glance. As I go to the back room to punch my time card, I see her tear stained face behind the circulation desk. She looks up, flustered. She tells me in a strained voice that John Gardner has just died in a motorcycle accident, driving to his home in Susquehanna. Who, I ask? "You know, the author of Mickelsson's Ghosts? Just came out a few months ago?" I have no idea who she is talking about.
It is January 1986, and I am sitting on the couch in my parents house. I no longer reside in Binghamton, but impressions and feelings of my time there have seared into my memory. Bits and pieces of these rise up as I read through Mickelsson's Ghosts, which I finish a one week fog of beer and cigarettes, accompanied by the sounds of George Winston on my Walkman and a crackling fireplace. I am amazed at how precisely the novel captures the woodsy grit of academic life in a dilapidated northern town. The book is an echo of my life: a philosophy major enthralled by Nietzsche, a lone wolf given over to long walks in the winter woods, hunting for something lost, but I am not quite sure what that something might be. One of my collection of unopened bills serves as a bookmark, a tangible symbol of a futile attempt to stave off the consequences of poor decisions. I flip backwards through the book, pausing to meditate on the black and white photos that are sprinkled throughout: a snow drifted train track, a frozen waterfall, a broken down farm in mid-winter, a peeling sign beckoning travelers to vacation in the endless mountains. I arrive at the first page and start to read it again.
It is June 2016 and my current project is to re-read my top ten novels. Mickelsson's Ghosts is the first book I choose. I find myself still astounded at how literate the novel is, how the sentences crackle with intelligence, and how it weaves in the big issues of meaning, loss, abortion and the environment. And how powerfully it can still transport me to a time and place.
Set in the depressed winter of a small Pennsylvania mountain town, the novel unpacks my past; a hope that philosophy can show one how to live, and the eventual big reveal of philosophy as a dead-end as it consumes itself with language-games and what the meaning of is is. The turning away from philosophy to hedonism, and the consequential dream-crushing reality of debt; the romantic sentimentality of poverty. a misguided fondness for squalor and dive bars, the ensuing anxiety of responsibilities avoided, and the ever-present yearning for something bigger than a mere vocation.
I am a bit more clear-eyed now about its faults though. Certain sections are too rambling, especially the last third of the book, and a few circumstances are contrived. In my third reading I notice arcs I'd forgotten or missed: the diminution of Nietzsche, initially portrayed as the superman and slowly transformed by book's end into a pitiful caricature. The poisoning of the environment mirroring a poisoning of the mind, the gray boundaries between reality and madness, the libel of Mormonism, the anti-abortion stance, the similarity with Crime and, eventual, Punishment.
Refreshingly, though not surprisingly, the book has a moral message; contentment is found by not inspecting reality too closely, problems not faced head on will boil and fester, and that purpose can be derived by fighting the evil that men do rather than an abstract devil. And that fortunately you don't need to be a mad philosophy professor to understand this.
It is January 1986, and I am sitting on the couch in my parents house. I no longer reside in Binghamton, but impressions and feelings of my time there have seared into my memory. Bits and pieces of these rise up as I read through Mickelsson's Ghosts, which I finish a one week fog of beer and cigarettes, accompanied by the sounds of George Winston on my Walkman and a crackling fireplace. I am amazed at how precisely the novel captures the woodsy grit of academic life in a dilapidated northern town. The book is an echo of my life: a philosophy major enthralled by Nietzsche, a lone wolf given over to long walks in the winter woods, hunting for something lost, but I am not quite sure what that something might be. One of my collection of unopened bills serves as a bookmark, a tangible symbol of a futile attempt to stave off the consequences of poor decisions. I flip backwards through the book, pausing to meditate on the black and white photos that are sprinkled throughout: a snow drifted train track, a frozen waterfall, a broken down farm in mid-winter, a peeling sign beckoning travelers to vacation in the endless mountains. I arrive at the first page and start to read it again.
It is June 2016 and my current project is to re-read my top ten novels. Mickelsson's Ghosts is the first book I choose. I find myself still astounded at how literate the novel is, how the sentences crackle with intelligence, and how it weaves in the big issues of meaning, loss, abortion and the environment. And how powerfully it can still transport me to a time and place.
Set in the depressed winter of a small Pennsylvania mountain town, the novel unpacks my past; a hope that philosophy can show one how to live, and the eventual big reveal of philosophy as a dead-end as it consumes itself with language-games and what the meaning of is is. The turning away from philosophy to hedonism, and the consequential dream-crushing reality of debt; the romantic sentimentality of poverty. a misguided fondness for squalor and dive bars, the ensuing anxiety of responsibilities avoided, and the ever-present yearning for something bigger than a mere vocation.
I am a bit more clear-eyed now about its faults though. Certain sections are too rambling, especially the last third of the book, and a few circumstances are contrived. In my third reading I notice arcs I'd forgotten or missed: the diminution of Nietzsche, initially portrayed as the superman and slowly transformed by book's end into a pitiful caricature. The poisoning of the environment mirroring a poisoning of the mind, the gray boundaries between reality and madness, the libel of Mormonism, the anti-abortion stance, the similarity with Crime and, eventual, Punishment.
Refreshingly, though not surprisingly, the book has a moral message; contentment is found by not inspecting reality too closely, problems not faced head on will boil and fester, and that purpose can be derived by fighting the evil that men do rather than an abstract devil. And that fortunately you don't need to be a mad philosophy professor to understand this.
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