Emerson Avery That Latin Teacher

Emerson Avery, That Latin Teacher is modern American literary fiction with a Southern flavor along with a few splashes of memoir. The core of the novel, covering about seven days, concerns Emerson Avery’s two trips into places of his past which clarify the source of his struggles with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and answers questions about his youth. Now at the coda of his life, he wants to achieve an existential understanding of himself. He is bright and fascinated with life around him – the human comedy – and he is devoted to his former pupils, family (some surrogate), and friends. The author, John Allen Boyd, has lived a life similar to that of Emerson, and, as such, the novel contains anecdotes that are partly memoir. Partly. But where is fiction purely fiction? As Emerson encounters those formative years and thinks about the present and the future, the novel moves like a person walking through a busy market place that stretches and detours for miles – stopping here and there for close inspection and possible purchases – moving quickly along at other places – observing people – leaving one display or another only to return later – always watching and listening and smelling and, sometimes, touching. There is quiet honey-soaked Southern life balanced with shocking horror and cruelty. There is the purity of man-wife love in contrast to depravity and perversity. Soaring intellect and dire ignorance. Trust and freedom and innocence teetering along side predation and indenture and insanity. Blind loyalty to tribalism against independence. Beauty and the hideous. Belief versus knowledge. Children and adults. And, throughout the novel, music, music, yes, music! What better way for a person to discover self. Its mystical power like walking naked under the rising sun or the full harvest moon. A reader may perceive the novel as a woven cloth, a fabric made from various threads that interweave and become visible again and again. Their warp and woof. There are numerous anecdotes and short stories that are ancillary to the main plot. And all of them are abstractions of the life of Emerson Avery. There are several themes that resound: Emerson is a part of all that he has met (Tennyson), people are more alike than different, and life among humans is not much of a departure from that of the lower animals considering our predatory acts on innocence and trust – our greed for things and lust for dominance. Also, we remain awash in primitive language as we attempt to translate our images into words – into any art form. He accepts that all art is translation. After all, he was a teacher of Latin. Likewise, Emerson sees us, as much today as any time in human history, swimming in the seas of mythology and superstition – especially the naïve and altruistic, whether urbane or rural. Ignorance is alive and abounding as are racism and tribalism, those perverse loyalties. People are funny, or is strange the better word? Emerson is a nurturer and finds self-worth in fostering young minds. Affirming their efforts to survive intelligently. He considers most human systems absurd and is an uncomfortable nihilist. Yet, in all of this, he is an optimist and usually calm in living his life in two houses – the place where he sleeps and in his classrooms. In his private life, he is intensely introspective and scholarly. In his classrooms and among friends he is extroverted, affable, and outgoing. His safety nets are music and reading, where he can sort it all out. While composing this novel, the author refused to write it in the manner of some of the dullest books he has ever read: linear narration – a plot trudging along from point A to point Z with the expected high points and low. Instead, he narrates his story using stories within stories within stories (Proust). He uses a variety of writing styles: straight narration, stream of conscious, fantasy, and other departures from the usual journalistic drivel. He has licen