The World Is Awake for Little Ones: A Celebration of Everyday Blessings

Tom Bowman is a university professor teaching literature in New York City in the early 1970s. In the beginning of this novel-as-screenplay he is described as "a middle-aged leftover of the Beat Generation," presenting "a derelict appearance" with a "long grey beard, shoulder length grey hair, dirty wrinkled trousers, tennis sneakers, a torn sweater," looking "half Christ, half Allan Ginsburg." He is a passionate teacher frustrated and angry, impatient with his students and contemptuous of his dull and academically regimented colleagues and their boring scholarship and interminable faculty meetings and idiotic committees. When a classroom experiment while teaching "The Rape of the Lock" leads a student to lodge a complaint against him, in the ensuing scandal Bowman abruptly quits his tenured position, leaves his wife, and embarks on an odyssey of self-discovery and spiritual renewal. Lacking any apparent marketable skills, as an employment agency coldly informs him, he starts a love affair with one of his former students, a young actress who is playing Celimene in a production of Moliere's "The Misanthrope" that a small, idealistic, multiracial acting company is struggling to mount in a run- down little storefront theatre on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. As Bowman gradually involves himself in the destiny of the little company, calling themselves The Last Ditch Classical Repertory Theatre, long dormant talents and ambitions awaken in him. He feels truly alive for the first time since he was himself a student.

It's a serious attempt at a literary story about how we short-change ourselves in life, and how we compromise everything most important to us without even realizing we are compromising. But it's also a story filled with comical characters and hilarious adventures. It is a story equally about theatre life and university life, about sex and love and philanthropy.

The slightly tongue-in-cheek Author's Preface explains that "the action sprawls all over New York City, from Brooklyn, to the Lower East Side, from Greenwich Village to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Important events take place in university classrooms, in the bar car of the Long Island Railroad, in an airport, inside an Off Off Broadway theatre in the Bowery, in a subway car, in Bowman's Long Island home, in his girlfriend's apartment near what is presently SoHo, and in another girlfriend's apartment on the West Side. The climactic event in the story is the production of a play."

"The Misanthropes" is a kind of experiment in mixing genres. I like to think of it as a novel in the form of a screenplay, that is a screenplay never intended to be filmed, a screenplay that one reads as if it were a novel, designed to stretch the imagination of the reader. Indeed imagination might be seen as the true theme of the work. The capacity to imagine is what sets off characters from each other. Those who lack imagination fare badly. Those who are lucky enough to be possessed of lively and robust imaginations are ultimately exalted. My goal is the goal of any writer creating fiction: to make-up a world of the imagination that seems more believable to the reader than the world he actually inhabits and thinks he knows.