Just Finished Reading The History of Now by Daniel Klein

Daniel Klein, a writer who has written a few fictional novels as well as a series of humorous books on philosophy, in 2009 came out with a novel that has a philosophical bent to it: The History of Now.  With such an ambitious-sounding title, this book was bound to disappoint...and it did, to some extent.  Not that the story wasn't interesting...it certainly was, and the characters were compelling as well.  It's just that Klein wrote this rather ordinary tale of the passage of generations in a small New England town in such a pretentious manner that it demanded at least a little rejection from me.  It also had a distasteful ring of political correctness about it, something I'll get into a little later...

The (fictional) town of Grandville, Massachusetts goes back centuries, but the story begins at the renovation of a downtown street in the late nineteenth century after an arsonist burned down the old buildings.  Four influential families plan the restoration which includes a beautiful theater for the showing of plays.  The deVries family is behind the theater project, and eventually the tale settles down into the telling of the life of one of their descendants, Wendel, as he finds himself happily living out his life as the projector operator for this theater, now devoted to showing movies.  His daughter Franny and granddaughter Lila also have their own lives, and throwing in Hector, a young man displaced by war and organized crime in his native Colombia, we have the core of the story, primarily presented from the viewpoints of Wendel, Franny, Lila, and Hector...but with the author's pretentiousness hovering over everything...

Trying as hard as I could to get the drift of what Klein was trying to express with this tale of rather ordinary people, I concluded that he was saying that history need not be only about the tumultuous events of rulers, wars, politics, and major trends and innovations, but it is also concerned with the lives and origins of "regular" folks.  If that was what he was after, then I didn't need to read this book: I already know that, as do most of us.  I also got the feeling that he was promoting the life-philosophy of Wendel, who relishes the present moment and seeks to find a sense of connection with others and the world around him.  That I could dig...I sort of liked Wendel and identified with him.  What bugged me a lot about The History of Now was how Klein used it as a political rant against George W. Bush and his Iraq War, not that I approved of that very costly military adventure, either.  That kind of convenient political correctness bothered me a lot.  But his more incidentally politically correct inclusion of African-Americans and Latinos into the story was a brilliant stroke, as it revealed the interconnectedness of humanity, our interdependence, and often entangled origins, in spite of the imaginary walls we sometimes like to employ to artificially divide ourselves from one another...

If you want an interesting story about the lives of people like you or me, than The History of Now is a good book to pick up and read.  But I would be careful and try to avoid reading it as some kind of philosophical treatise: it isn't...