Gone Tomorrow
Gone Tomorrow Love, talent and ambition - Mark C. Hiser - New Albany, OH USA
George Canaris, author of a book included in a list of the top 100 American novels, comes to a college in Ohio (thinly veiled as Kenyon) to teach and to write. Upon his arrival he is warned that “this is a place that eats careers, ambitions, talent. It will destroy you if you let it. Not maliciously. Fondly, smilingly, appreciatively. It will flow into every crevice of your life, occupy every vacuum, claim every moment of rest and silence, if you let it[.] Though he planned to teach for a short time, Canaris falls in love with the college and its people and soon finds himself engulfed by that love. Quickly he gains a reputation as a legendary professor, but eventually as a joke since there is no evidence that he has continued writing even though he often talks of working on his “Beast.”
Shortly after the college president forces the professor to retire, Canaris dies from a hit-and-run accident. While going through Canaris’s belongings, his literary executor discovers Canaris had written a book about his final year as writer-in-residence at the college. It is in the telling of his story that we see a man observant of endings, loss, dreams and creative potential as well as life in the academic world.
I thoroughly enjoyed this novel with its sense of place since I teach writing in a small liberal arts college in Ohio. I, however, particularly liked the book because the author made me care for the characters, even those who serve a small role in the plot of Canaris’s life. If you want to spend a little time back in school, I recommend P. F. Kluge’s Gone Tomorrow.
: The fiction surprise of 2008—heralded by The New York Times as “a sharply observed yet tender novel” and a “quirky, tart yet unexpectedly generous story”—finally in paperback
Kluge’s brilliant novel tells of George Canaris, a writing professor who is on the verge of forced retirement at a small college in Ohio when he is killed by a hit-and-run driver. Kluge’s creation of Canaris as the first faculty member in half a century whose death merits an obituary in the New York Times is right on the money. “A writer, a critic, a professor, a campus legend and a national figure, the very embodiment of the liberal arts,” the fictional Times obituary said. And a mystery. Canaris, hero and anti-hero, was the author of two well-received novels and a book of essays, all published more than thirty years ago. Taken together, they were the beginnings of an impressive shelf to which, in all his years in Ohio, he added nothing. “Compared to Faulkner and Dos Passo at the start of his career,” the Times observed, “in the end Canaris resembled Harper Lee.”
With a book listed among the 100 greatest novels of all time, decades separating Canaris from the hefty advance taken on his next book—The Beast, which was to be his masterpiece—and not a page to show of it, Canaris is a great fictional creation—an enigma. Inevitably, speculation grows that the book was a myth, a lie, a joke. Every passing year made skeptics more confident. But never certain.
Upon his death, Mark May, a young English professor who barely knew him finds himself named as Canaris’s literary executor… executor of what is unclear. Thus begins a search through lives and letters that is at once gripping, hilarious and affirming. A true page-turner, P.F. Kluge’s Gone Tomorrow, is equal parts Richard Russo and Michael Chabon, and yet entirely unlike anything you’ve ever read.
Gone Tomorrow
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