Work in Progress
Every Tom, Dick, and Harry
a novel
I completed the first draft of Every Tom, Dick, and Harry (ETDH) Monday afternoon, July 26, 2010, during a vacation on the North Shore, just outside Tofte, Minnesota. Set against the backdrop of the second Iraq War (in particular the years 2003 - 2007), ETDH narrates the experience of Tom Faust, Dick Rayburn, and Harry Merchant as they stumble through life, pursuing love and happiness, confronting personal demons and ethical dilemmas, repeatedly losing and regaining their way.
Tom, a history professor at a liberal arts college in St. Paul, has been mourning Helen, his dead wife, for nine years. He cultivates her garden, cherishes objects that belonged to her as if they were relics, and putters his way through life, giving the same lectures year after year and talking to his colleagues about the book he has been writing and would finish . . . if only he had the time. Unfortunately for Tom, the college grants him a sabbatical leave for spring semester, 2003, and expects him to return in the fall with a completed manuscript. Tom knows the book will never exist and fears the whole world will see him for what he now believes he is--a fake. When he learns Helen might have loved someone else, he begins to fall apart.
That someone else is Dick. Tom and Dick lived together when they were graduate students, in a large house infamous for its parties. Dick's friends admired and envied the handsome, talented, charismatic performer and playboy who got everything he wanted. But Dick has a dark side. Haunted by the memory of the people he has loved and lost and consumed by rage toward those he believed caused the loss, he becomes obsessed with obtaining enough wealth and power to ensure he will never lose again. In 2003 he reaches the pinnacle of his success, when he becomes the Director of Private Development in Iraq.
Harry, a former priest and a fatherless child, whose mother destined him for the priesthood, is at war with himself and the world. As a teenager and a young man, Harry sought a father in religion, literature, and philosophy and created a severe and unforgiving super-ego that demands social justice. Deciding that caring for the homeless and the hungry enables a system of exploitation to continue to exist, Harry becomes obsessed with changing the system itself and finding the people who can be held responsible. But Harry also strives to find what he has never known: love that is not conditioned on obedience, love that can take him outside of his obsessions.
The forces that drive Tom, Dick, and Harry set them on a collision course with one another, and the collisions change the characters. I hope you will read the book so you can follow these characters as they pursue their dreams and obsessions around the United States, Western Europe, and the Middle East.
These are complicated characters--the kind of characters that can draw readers into their lives. Readers of my debut novel, Whiteout, frequently commented on how deeply the novel had affected them by leading them back into their own lives. As a writer, I want to provide my readers with a window to the outside world and a mirror to the inside.
