I just finished your book. The end took me short - left me hanging, expecting more. I still identify with Tim, and I'm sad to think atfger all this, he's still the lonely loser, just with one more hurt, maybe the biggest one, to add to his collection. It's reality. Nice guys do finish last in today's society, and nice guys with Christian values are really at the end of the pack. The losers in the sexual revolution are women, children - and nice guys with morals and the right values. The only winners are the worst of the male sex - the predatory Alpha males - the Dylans of the world. That's reality, but I think a Catholic novel should point to a reality where it doesn't have to be, where the wicked don't prosper ALL the time, where the nice Catholic guy gets to marry the girl at least SOME of the time. A world where there's a place or forgiveness and starting over. Maybe I'm a romantic, but while I could see where the plot was heading, I was hoping against hope that somehow Pam's eyes would be opened, that she would see Jesus through Tim's goodness, and turn her life around with his help and his love. I suspected, wrongly, that Tim might end up with Cate, and while that's not the ending I hoped for, it's more than just Pam eating her cornflakes. Yet I still give the book a hearty thumbs up because you've succeeded totally at making the reader, at least this reader, part of your character's world, caring what happens to them.


I suppose I look at it from Tim's prespective because I am a man, with many of the same experiences (I even got married when I was 31, almost 32, just as Tim might have done with a different ending). A female reader might identify with Pam. From that standpoint, the book did have a "happy" ending in that Pam is finally re-evaluating her life and everything she thought she knew and believed. (There's a song by Weird Al Yankovic called "Everything You Know Is Wrong". That should be Pam's theme song.) Too bad about poor Tim, but at least he helped plant the seed in her heart, and now she's in God's kindergarten. I've known uping women like Pam. I've lived whole my life between the suburbs of Washington DC (Montgomery County, where I live, has a sizeable Jewish population) and the Miami, Florida area (likewise). Most "ethnically" Jewish people I've known are among the most stridently secular people I've met, with no deeper connection to their own heritage than bagels for breakfast. They have a different outlook not only from religious believers (Christians or Jews) but from people who were raised in a faith they later rejected - they had nothing to reject. The secular humanist view is all they've ever known. For all their intelligence, for all their formal education, no one's every taught them anything different.


That gives them a strange combination of naievete about the realities of sex and morality that's almost a kind of innocence. They're smart, but they're incredibly ignorant, the kind of ignornace that makes them vulnerable. I don't know if the Chandra Levy case got as much coverage in Canada as it did in the US, (the intern who was having an affair with a married Congressman, then disappeared last year, and whose remains were found in Rock Creek Park just a few weeks ago.) The media coverage here (esp. in the DC area) bordered on the obsessive. We learned that when Chandra told her aunt of the "relationship", her aunt gave her some woman to woman advice - rearrange his closets! (I suppose to keep his interest in her.) Of course she would never be so judgmental as to tell her sweet, vulnerable niece that it was wrong to sleep with a married man. My guess is that nobody did. If they had, that young woman might be alive today. Maybe Tim saved Pam's life! Or more importantly, her soul.





I hope there's a sequel, or at least an epilogue. I want to see a new Pam, a "secondary virginal" Pam, find another decent man and marry him. I also want to see Tim find somebody, even if it's not Pam. Some critics might rake you over the coals for providing a "facile, Pollyannish happy ending" adn remind you, as if you didn't already know, that life rarely works out that way. Well, hang it, it should! Maybe your writing will appeal to readers on the level of emotion rather than argument, and play a small part in helping to change reality.





I know, I talk too much, but your story did connect with me on an emotional level. On a purely technical level, there are a few spellng and grammatical errors I noticed. Someone who edits all the time would undoubtedly catch more. I wasn't reading for that, I plowed through because I wanted to see what happened with Pam and Tim. I'd find someone who is good at catching that kind of thing. (i still find some every time, and I've been through my own novel dozens of times.)


Take care,


Randall

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Thanks Randall for your comments. I wish I could have written a better ending, and will try to make it a little more substantial. I've been brainwashed into believing that good literature never has a happy ending. That's what they teach in English lit in college these days.




I'm wondering if any other readers feel that Pam should have some kind of secondary virginity, and that Tim should marry somebody.




Which reminds me, Cate is left hanging at the end.




And I know there were probably tons of spelling and grammar mistakes. I worry enough about the story, I don't want to get bogged down in that sort of thing.

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I just finished your book. The end took me short - left me hanging, expecting more. I still identify with Tim, and I'm sad to think atfger all this, he's still the lonely loser, just with one more hurt, maybe the biggest one, to add to his collection. It's reality. Nice guys do finish last in today's society, and nice guys with Christian values are really at the end of the pack. The losers in the sexual revolution are women, children - and nice guys with morals and the right values. The only winners are the worst of the male sex - the predatory Alpha males - the Dylans of the world. That's reality, but I think a Catholic novel should point to a reality where it doesn't have to be, where the wicked don't prosper ALL the time, where the nice Catholic guy gets to marry the girl at least SOME of the time. A world where there's a place or forgiveness and starting over. Maybe I'm a romantic, but while I could see where the plot was heading, I was hoping against hope that somehow Pam's eyes would be opened, that she would see Jesus through Tim's goodness, and turn her life around with his help and his love. I suspected, wrongly, that Tim might end up with Cate, and while that's not the ending I hoped for, it's more than just Pam eating her cornflakes. Yet I still give the book a hearty thumbs up because you've succeeded totally at making the reader, at least this reader, part of your character's world, caring what happens to them.


I suppose I look at it from Tim's prespective because I am a man, with many of the same experiences (I even got married when I was 31, almost 32, just as Tim might have done with a different ending). A female reader might identify with Pam. From that standpoint, the book did have a "happy" ending in that Pam is finally re-evaluating her life and everything she thought she knew and believed. (There's a song by Weird Al Yankovic called "Everything You Know Is Wrong". That should be Pam's theme song.) Too bad about poor Tim, but at least he helped plant the seed in her heart, and now she's in God's kindergarten. I've known uping women like Pam. I've lived whole my life between the suburbs of Washington DC (Montgomery County, where I live, has a sizeable Jewish population) and the Miami, Florida area (likewise). Most "ethnically" Jewish people I've known are among the most stridently secular people I've met, with no deeper connection to their own heritage than bagels for breakfast. They have a different outlook not only from religious believers (Christians or Jews) but from people who were raised in a faith they later rejected - they had nothing to reject. The secular humanist view is all they've ever known. For all their intelligence, for all their formal education, no one's every taught them anything different.


That gives them a strange combination of naievete about the realities of sex and morality that's almost a kind of innocence. They're smart, but they're incredibly ignorant, the kind of ignornace that makes them vulnerable. I don't know if the Chandra Levy case got as much coverage in Canada as it did in the US, (the intern who was having an affair with a married Congressman, then disappeared last year, and whose remains were found in Rock Creek Park just a few weeks ago.) The media coverage here (esp. in the DC area) bordered on the obsessive. We learned that when Chandra told her aunt of the "relationship", her aunt gave her some woman to woman advice - rearrange his closets! (I suppose to keep his interest in her.) Of course she would never be so judgmental as to tell her sweet, vulnerable niece that it was wrong to sleep with a married man. My guess is that nobody did. If they had, that young woman might be alive today. Maybe Tim saved Pam's life! Or more importantly, her soul.





I hope there's a sequel, or at least an epilogue. I want to see a new Pam, a "secondary virginal" Pam, find another decent man and marry him. I also want to see Tim find somebody, even if it's not Pam. Some critics might rake you over the coals for providing a "facile, Pollyannish happy ending" adn remind you, as if you didn't already know, that life rarely works out that way. Well, hang it, it should! Maybe your writing will appeal to readers on the level of emotion rather than argument, and play a small part in helping to change reality.





I know, I talk too much, but your story did connect with me on an emotional level. On a purely technical level, there are a few spellng and grammatical errors I noticed. Someone who edits all the time would undoubtedly catch more. I wasn't reading for that, I plowed through because I wanted to see what happened with Pam and Tim. I'd find someone who is good at catching that kind of thing. (i still find some every time, and I've been through my own novel dozens of times.)


Take care,


Randall

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Replying to:

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