Choosing Hope in a Jaded Age: On Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden

Providence dictated that I should read Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden the week after I read George Orwell’s 1984, a serendipitous albeit arbitrary ordering. One week I happened to pick 1984 randomly off an unread classics list I have been working through, the next, Book Club obligations brought Theo of Golden to the fore.

When I was done reading 1984 I wanted to fight somebody. I wish that I was exaggerating. I knew it was a dystopian novel but I did not expect it to end with so much darkness and defeat. Nor that evil would score such a resounding, unequivocal victory and that Orwell would do such a meticulous job of purging all hope from its pages. No light, no hope, no redemption arc equals waiting for Godot in the Valley of Death. What’s the point? Two weeks on, having recovered from the initial shock, I concede that dystopia has its place in literature. Dystopia works in Ursula le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, for example, because it carries with it and within it an imperative. A so what? It is an uncomfortable darkness that points towards light. My problem with 1984 was not where it took me but where it left me. On that account I still nurse a grudge.

Turns out though, that reading Theo of Golden was just the antidote I needed to rinse the bitter aftertaste of Orwell’s latter day pessimism off my literary palate. Because while Orwell cynically tests the limits of who we have the potential to become when we are the worst version of ourselves, Allen Levi explores the opposite end of the spectrum, gently encouraging us to imagine what it might look like if we sought truth, made beauty and lived well.

Theo of Golden has a muted beginning marked by the protagonist’s arrival in Golden, a small town in the American south. He’s a mysterious fellow, our Theo, in his mid eighties, dapper, delightfully mannered, evasively mononymous, in possession of a slight European accent and a heather-green flat cap. The town of Golden, meanwhile, seems to straddle the line between the idyllic and the typical of towns in the American south, an idea rather than a concrete place, but it serves the story and backgrounds the characters adequately. It happens, in the season of the story, to be in the throes of a downtown renaissance, in the process of coming alive again.

We don’t know what has brought Theo to town but he soon zeroes in on a project to direct his energy toward, hatching an elaborate plot to buy the portraits on display at a local coffee shop and to gift them one by one to their subjects. He concocts a harmless ritual in service of this end, sending handwritten invitations to the would-be beneficiaries of his generosity asking them to meet him in a public place. He’ll be the exquisitely dressed 86-year old man in the heather green cap.

One by one they meet him there. He gifts them the promised portrait then gently asks a question that unlocks their life story. He takes the time to see them for who they really are and speaks words of insight and affirmation into their lives. With his words and with his attention he bestows dignity. When they leave Theo’s presence they carry with them a little bit of his glow. And so it goes that Golden, and presumably the world, becomes a better, brighter place. It’s all very warm and fuzzy and maybe just a little too on the nose.

Soon, he cultivates a string of relationships with the cast of colourful characters that populates the book: a coffee shop owner, a boisterous Vietnam veteran now proprietor of a cleverly named bookshop, the local artist whose work is displayed in the coffee shop, a music student whose distinguishing characteristic is the Cello he hauls to and fro from the nearby university every day, a night janitor at the university, a former teacher, now a busker, an influential broker who owns the apartment he eventually rents, a homeless woman whose entire life revolves around her bicycle, a young accountant who harbours a secret regret.

Levi pulls back the curtain on Theo’s story laboriously, making both the reader and the residents of Golden earn the right to know. He grew up in Portugal we eventually learn, has lived all over the world and has come to Golden by way of New York. We do not know, until the sun is about to set on the story, why such a worldly man picked Golden. We deduce that he is a man of considerable means by virtue of his casually depositing a six figure cheque with the influential broker to underwrite his expenses, his impulsively and anonymously taking on the significant medical costs of one of the town’s residents, and his anonymously hiring a good lawyer for an illegal immigrant who he is not personally acquainted with. We do not know from whence his wealth comes.

We also eventually piece together by the aggregate of his actions that he is a connoisseur, and perhaps an aspiring patron, of the arts. He pays for portraits created by a local artist, sends art supplies to another budding artist confined to a hospital bed, buys the student virtuoso a high quality bow for his cello, tips the local busker generously, and enthusiastically encourages the homeless woman to pursue entrepreneurship with her beautiful invention, the Featherwood.

A quarter way through the novel, our patience is rewarded with a flashback to a tragic event in Theo’s past that has left an indelible scar on him. ‘Our’ meaning the readers’ patience. The residents of Golden are not so privileged.

And so the book ambles along down a sidewalk on story mainstreet, occasionally pausing to peer at a character through a chapter window but mostly just moving forward at a steady, unhurried pace.

There’s no central villain. It soon becomes clear that Levi has no desire or inclination to deal with unsavoury characters. He halfheartedly helicopters in two-dimensional minor characters to disturb the peace but is obviously discomfited by them and has no interest or investment in them. He ushers them off page at the earliest opportunity.

Nor is there, to compensate, a daunting obstacle that our protagonist must overcome. Sure, there is the sometimes delicate, sometimes complicated work of identifying and tracking down the people featured in the portraits, but Theo eventually delegates most of this work to others, confining his role to the composition of handwritten notes to each recipient and attending the actual meeting. Even here, his path is uncharacteristically clear for a protagonist. Can there be a hero’s journey without a viable enemy and a significant ordeal we wonder? Perhaps Levi means for us to conclude that we are joining Theo at the tail end of the journey, on the road back. That the obstacle and the antagonist are in the past.

But in the end there’s no way to sidestep the conclusion that we are in the hands of a staunch optimist by temperament, one in whom hope springs eternal and one who writes with a faint but unmistakable Christian accent.

The Audible version has an afterword that the book does not. In this afterword Levi describes Theo as a man who has made the decision to live a life that is deeply generous, whimsically creative, self forgetful and full of kindness. Then he beseeches us not to read Theo of Golden as an idealistic story but rather as pure realism. I understand why he feels compelled to make this plea but I demur. Theo of Golden is a ferociously optimistic novel and, by me, there’s nothing wrong with that.

I am reminded of a clip I watched of Toni Morrison responding to a question asked at a literary festival about how we survive whole when we’re all victims of something. She talks about behaving as beautifully as one can under impossible circumstances then asserts, very firmly, that good is more interesting, more complex and more demanding than evil. Evil is horrible but it is also silly and is not a compelling idea therefore needs to be dressed up elaborately in order to draw attention, she says. Goodness is just more intellectually compelling.

I love this.

We live in cynical times but perhaps overindulging that cynicism and admitting pessimism alongside puts our souls in danger of shrivelling. Levi’s description of the initially unwelcoming Mrs Gridley is sharply observed: ‘she had felt the slow contraction,’ he says, ‘of a soul that had given itself too completely and with too great a sense of importance, to the marketplace.’

Why not give ourselves over to a healthy dose of optimism and idealism instead?

In the course of his year in Golden, Theo bestowed many gifts, but the most meaningful and valuable were the least tangible: dignity and attention. My favourite relationship that Theo developed and nurtured during his year in Golden was with Ellen, the homeless woman. He did not try to solve her homelessness, although, given his orientation towards the world and his means, he could have if he wanted to. Instead, he accorded her human dignity with a bespoke handwritten letter and a portrait, gave her his genuinely engaged and undivided attention, and asked her about her story. He listened to her and affirmed her as wise and strong and, significantly to her, motherly.

There were others in the community who were kind to her. Shep. Tony. Jason. Mrs Ocie van Blarcum. But somehow she distinguished in Theo someone who saw her as human. Thus in church she declined kind Mrs Ocie van Blarcum’s invitation to sit with her family and insisted she wanted to sit with Theo. “No man has ever sent me a handwritten letter before, “ she told him. It was as simple and as special as that. She called him her one eccentric friend. Her friend. He graciously accepted a tour along the River as a reciprocal gift, and received her special handcrafted offering besides. That too was a deeply dignifying act. She saw that he did not see her as less than because she sometimes lived under the bridge.

Even though in encounters such as these Theo comes off as too good to be true, we indulge Levi for the most part and let him have his fantasy. He had, after all, signalled at the outset by the name he gave his protagonist that he had a mind to infuse him with the nature of God himself. Credit to some serious tightrope walking on Levi’s part that Theo doesn’t land on the page as insufferably perfect. It’s not so much that we feel that we can be like him but that he leaves us wondering what it would be like if we were to learn from him how to navigate the world with kindness, how to look intently into people’s faces and how to be a force for good in the world.

Speaking of indulging optimism and idealism reminds me of Aaron Sorkin’s short-lived TV series The Newsroom. It was one of my favourite TV series ever, mostly because Sorkin was unabashedly idealistic in projecting the image of what the news media could be at their best. Unsurprisingly, news media practitioners hated it: he bruised a lot of egos in his attempt at modelling what could be. The audience ratings were skyhigh, though, and that should tell us something.

I remember The Newsroom now because of a meta conversation that took place in the Season 2 finale between two principal characters: Sam Waterston’s Charlie Skinner and Jeff Daniel’s Will McAvoy. It was a significant exchange because the episode was originally intended to be the series finale. Sorkin, tired of the flak he was taking, was having his final say.

The conversation was embedded into a high stakes moment. The fictional Newsroom team had aired a false story on the back of forged footage resulting in a public outcry and industry uproar. So the leadership of the newsroom, Charlie, Will and Mac, had resolved to take responsibility for the error and resign in order to restore credibility to the organisation. But Charlie had begun to question that decision. Maybe walking away wasn’t the answer. Maybe they should stay. It had been a mistake, not an act of malice after all. It was while mulling this that Charlie asked Will if he had read Jedediah Purdy’s book For Common Things. He described how it talked about cynical times, people having terminal irony with a studied refusal to hope or care openly.

I suspect that Aaron Sorkin included this reference because he felt a kinship with Jedediah Purdy. Reviewers had savaged Jedediah’s book a decade earlier, just as they were now savaging Aaron Sorkin’s series. Jedediah, surprisingly young at the time of authorship, was scorned as, among other things, insufferably smug. Ouch.

He was an ”Optimist in a Jaded Age,” declared a review in Time magazine in partial explanation of the backlash.

That jaded age persists today but its utility, if ever it had any, is waning. It is easy to be cynical. It’s hard to be hopeful.

If I have to choose, I choose to be hopeful.

As to the technical elements, suffice it to say its literary deficits are not fatal to the project. The storytelling surpasses the writing, but not so much as to cause the stool it stands on to wobble. There are plotlines that could do with some tidying up, characters that could be more rounded and paragraphs that could have been tightened. But, overall, it works. Despite breaking a lot of rules of novel writing, somehow it works. Its deficiencies do not make it less, they make it what it is.

Even the end, although we come to it by a truly shocking turn, eventually does justice to the story, to my mind at least.

Forever more the town of Golden will be marked by two eras: Before Theo, and After Theo. And that, I suppose, is the kind of impact one wants to have on the world. Theo is our best self. A portrait of us living our best life. Cheesy? Absolutely. But load me up on the cheese please and thank you.

This house is reminded that we all need a spark of optimism in our lives. We have Theo of Golden to thank for that.