Read Philosophy Made Simple Online
Authors: Robert Hellenga
Philosophy Made Simple
PHILOSOPHY MADE SIMPLE
“Sweet and lovely. … A charmingly picaresque tale…. Rudy Harrington is a trusting, thoughtful man whose lovability is so artfully created that to get to know him is a treat…. Since this is a novel, it is not a surprise to learn where Hellenga stands on the ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature. He makes his case against Plato well, moving us with pathos and pleasure,
startling us into wisdom.”
— Rebecca Newberger Goldstein,
New York Times Book Review
“In Hellenga’s vibrant fourth novel, a retired widower embarks on a semi-philosophical quest that yields an avocado grove,
an elephant, and a new love…. There’s nothing whimsical about this solidly grounded fiction, which enchantingly explores the space between philosophical concepts and our hapless floundering in life’s challenges.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)
“Fans of Robert Hellenga’s
The Sixteen Pleasures
will be glad to learn that the heroine, Margot Harrington, is back in his new novel…. Hellenga makes philosophy concrete and lyrical.”
— Polly Shulman,
Newsday
“Rudy is smack in the midst of the profound mysteries of existence…. Searching for the reality behind reality, the thing itself,
he abandons his philosophers and ‘for a brief moment he sees things as they really are.’ This epiphany is exhilarating for both Rudy and for the reader.”
— Barbara Fischer,
Boston Globe
“Wonderfully accomplished. … A frolic in the mode of the comedy-tinged seriousness of John Steinbeck’s
Cannery Row…
. Robert Hel-lengas ability to ground his intelligence in the everyday and produce novels that are smart and intellectually engaging while at the same time emotionally compelling is a rare thing.”
— Alan Cheuse,
Chicago Tribune
“He’s a capable and clever writer, able to mix widely different intellectual strands into a simple whole. We have philosophy,
family relations, avocado farming, parallel universes, and abstract painting, all resting comfortably together…. Hellenga is masterful at capturing the poignancy of a rite of passage, whether it be our children moving out, the selling of the family house, the parting after weddings, the shift of life at retirement, or the memories of when our marriages worked and when they didn’t…. Hellenga reminds us, through story, that philosophy and life cannot be made simple.”
— Charles Oberndorf,
Cleveland Plain Dealer
“In something that is a bit of a rarity in these days of ubiquitous chick lit, here is a novel about life and love told in the voice of a man of experience…. Rudy finds his answers — and more.”
—
Library Journal
“In
Philosophy Made Simple,
Robert Hellenga offers an engagingly whim sical read, and a great deal of food for thought — a feast for the mind and for book group discussion.”
— Hilary Williamson, Bookloons.com
“In all of his novels Hellenga takes on large subjects, exploring them with insight and clarity. He tells great stories with humor, poignancy, and deep understanding, never leaving out the quirks and idiosyncrasies that make his people real.”
— Valerie Ryan,
Seattle Times
“A wry and gentle look at one man’s search for the meaning of his life. Readers will be enchanted by Rudy’s story … Robert Hellenga’s fourth novel gracefully tells the story of a man seeking ultimate meaning amid the mundane events of daily life.
Happily
Philosophy Made Simple
is anything but an introspective or pedantic work. In it, readers will meet an engaging cast of characters that includes a prickly Hindu holy man, a kindly Mexican flower shop owner who provides professional companionship to middle-aged men, and a gentle elephant named Norma Jean.”
— Harvey Freedenberg,
BookPage
“The plot moves along energetically fueled by an assortment of characters.”
— Barbara Liss,
Houston Chronicle
“Rudy’s touching search for answers maintains just the right amount of humor…. The characters, some deceptively simple but effective, offer up frequent surprises and insights as their lives intertwine with Rudy in his quest for enlightenment, which he gains in the end, at least for a moment.”
— Sandy Amazeen, MonstersandCritics.com
“Philosophy Made Simple
is the saga of a modest man trying to make sense of the shadows on the wall of his life. Robert Hellenga’s good humor and generosity keep the most serious subjects delightfully buoyant without detracting from their gravity. But finally, what’s most satisfying — and profound — about his writing is that he has great respect for the complexity of ordinary people and events (though he spices his story with some pretty extraordinary ones as well!). I loved this book, every graceful insight,
every unexpected turn.”
— Rosellen Brown, author of
Tender Mercies
ALSO BY ROBERT HELLENGA
The Sixteen Pleasures
The Fall of a Sparrow
Blues Lessons
Copyright © 2006 by Robert Hellenga
Reading group guide copyright
©
2007 by Robert Hellenga and Little, Brown and Company (Inc.)
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this
publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored
in a database or retrieval system,
without
the prior written permission of the publisher
Back Bay Books / little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
Parts of this novel originally appeared in somewhat different form in
Black Warrior, Columbia, Crazyhorse,
and
Mississippi Valley Review.
The author is grateful for permission to reprint the following:
“Sonnet XI” by Edna St. Vincent Millay is from
Collected Poems,
HarperCollins.
Copyright
© 1931, 1958
by Edna St. Vincent Millav and Norma Millay Ellis. All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Barnett, literary executor The excerpt from “Long-legged Fly”
by W. B. Yeats is reprinted with the permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult
Publishing Group, from
The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume 1: The Poems,
Revised,
edited by Richard
]. Finneran. Copyright
© 1940
by Georgie Yeats;
copyright renewed
©
1968 by Bertha Georgie Yeats, Michael Butler Yeats, and
Anne Yeats. “Vicksburg Is My Home” is
by
Hans Theessink.
From
Hard Road Blues —
Blue Grove (BG-6020). Copyright
© 1994.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and
not intended by the author
First eBook Edition: November 2009
ISBN: 978-0-316-09038-4
Contents
FOR MY WIFE, VIRGINIA
R
udy took up philosophy late in life. He wanted some answers, an explanation, or at least a chance to ponder the great mysteries,
before it was too late — love and death, the meaning and purpose of human existence, moments of vision, the voice of God,
the manifest indifference of the material universe to injustice and suffering, the insanity of war, the mysterious tug of beauty on the human heart. What did he know about these things? Not a lot. But something. He’d never had a college education.
He’d turned down a basketball scholarship at Michigan State University in order to go to work for Harry Becker up in Chicago.
But he hadn’t peddled avocados for thirty years on the South Water Street Market without learning a thing or two about life,
and Helen, his wife, had practiced all her lectures on him when she’d started teaching art history at Edgar Lee Masters, dropping her slides one at a time into the projector on the dining room table, the front end propped up on a couple of paperbacks so that it cast a slightly top-heavy image on the wall over the sideboard. So he knew a little bit about Beauty too. Beauty
with a capital B: not just a pretty face or a picturesque landscape, not just a Greek Aphrodite or a Renaissance nude or a Turner sunset, but something that might shoot out of an old man’s face or out of a side of beef, sharp as his carbon steel kitchen knives, sad as bent notes on his guitar, but joyful at the same time.
Rudy’d met Helen after a basketball game in Gary, Indiana, back in 1925. He’d played for a semipro team sponsored by the commission merchants on the market, the South Water Bluestreaks. Helen’s uncle, who worked for the Leshinsky Potato Company,
next to Becker’s on the market, was one of the refs and had introduced them after the last game of the season, in which Rudy’d made the winning basket. A week later, Saturday night, they’d taken the trolley up to Rogers Park to see Lon Chaney in
The Phantom of the Opera
at the new Granada Theater, and afterward they’d walked down to the lake. By the time Rudy got home it was three o’clock in the morning, but he wasn’t tired.
Helen had been dead for seven years now; Meg, their oldest, had a law degree and two kids and was planning to go back to work full-time; Molly, their middle daughter, was teaching social dancing at the Arabesque Dance Studio in Ann Arbor, Michigan,
while she studied to get her real-estate license; Margot, the youngest — a book conservator at the Newberry Library on the near North Side — had just gone to Italy on the spur of the moment, right after the big flood in Florence.
What had happened? Where had it gone? Life? His life? What would happen to him now? Looking back, he wondered about the scholarship.
Of course, if he’d accepted it, everything would have been different, wouldn’t it? He’d never have met Helen; he and Helen would never have bought this old house, never have had three daughters; Helen would never have gone to Italy and met Bruno Bruni, and so on. On the other hand, maybe in a par-
allel universe he
had
accepted it. And maybe in a parallel universe Helen was still alive, living in Italy with Bruni. That’s what his daughters Indian boyfriend, Tejinder Kaal, nephew of the philosopher Siva Singh, seemed to be getting at in an article that Molly’d sent him. Rudy hadn’t been able to make head nor tail of the article, which had been published in a journal called
Physical Review Letters.
Parallel universes. What a crock, he’d thought, but then Tejinders picture had appeared in the science pages of
Time
and
Newsweek,
along with sketches of ghostly people from parallel universes superimposed on photos of a playground
(Newsweek)
and a cemetery
(Time).
Both
Time
and
Newsweek
cited one of Helens favorite poems, “The Road Not Taken,” by Robert Frost, because, according to Tejinder, there
were
no roads not taken.
