Synopsis

The story opens in the year 2020, with a romantic/erotic dream sequence and waking of one lonely sixty-six year-old widower Chris Vadia, a retired professional musician, and his sullen celibate perspective due to his wife dying fifteen years earlier.  After establishing the time period and the impossibility of replacing human intimacy with the high-tech devices of the period, we flashback fifty years to 1970.  The story then leads to the serendipitous and comic circumstances of how he met the love of his life, while on a wild summer vacation driving through California with three friends.  A beach in Big Sur is the dramatic background for the fairy tale loss of their virginity.

Time then shifts chapter to chapter, through their college days, marriage, their struggling and successes, parental deaths, the World Trade Towers disaster, their Carnegie Hall debut, and then the crisis of having grown so far apart despite being with each other 24 hours a day. The novel explores how the deep flaws of both individuals bring them together through life, and how the chance actions of childhood experiences run so deep that they ultimately affect an entire life.  At age 51, she dies; the cause of Chris' mental downfall.  The reader then finds Chris in the present and the reason for the quick flashbacks of time from when he first began reminiscing on his beachside outdoor deck. The book’s climax occurs as Chris goes through a body/soul separation that is literally the culmination of all the previous chapters by using a device of repeating phrases (shown in italics) from previous chapters that now bear new meanings. The reader can now also understand that the opening dream in the first chapter was a foretelling of the entire book.

In the last chapter, his finds his life dramatically changed for the better as a result of his experience from a powerful singular event.

The unforgiving world, the false hope of technology, the commonality of human emotion throughout history ties into an uplifting romantic fairy tale.  The underlying theme is the imperfection of all things human and the unrelenting passage of time, but is written in a very positive manner. The road, throughout the novel is representative of one’s life path and sense of discovery.

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