Parallel Lives by Richard Seltzer
55,018 words
Literary Fiction, with touches of magic
realism, time
travel, and alternate history
The story, which begins in an assisted-living
facility in
New Hampshire, leads to 18th century Boston and London, where
there may be
unfinished business that residents, through mirror selves, must
take care of.
As Abe, Mercy. and their friends come under the
influence of
forces they don't understand, they adopt antique attire, get drunk
on
two-hundred-year-old wine, and become experts in the lives of
their other
selves. As Abe tells Mercy, "My dear, we have been granted not
just one,
but two lives. And in both it appears that we are fated to be
together. What
could go wrong?"
Correspondences:
Mercy is Mercy Otis Warren, playwright and
historian from
Massachusetts at the time of the American Revolution.
Jemmie is Mercy's brother James Otis, one of
the early
leaders the resistance against England, coining slogan "no
taxation
without representation."
Abe is Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne, the general
who at
Saratoga lost the battle that led to England losing the war and
who then became
one of the most popular playwrights on the London stage.
Cat is Catharine Macaulay, the first English
woman
historian, a fiercely independent lady who at the age of 47
scandalously
married a 21-year-old-man
Dick is Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the 18th
century
playwright.
To explain what is happening, Dick believes
that "each
of us is all of us"; and Cat, a radical believer in free will and
democratic government, comes to believe in the "nudge of fate" --
that instead of history consisting of a random set of events that
could have turned
out very differently, an unknown guiding force pushes us toward
what must be,
while preserving our illusion of free choice.
After dreams of what their other selves did and
could have
done, Mercy and Abe discover a tunnel in the basement that leads
to other
places and other times, where they could accidentally or
deliberately change
the course of history, where despite the cataclysmic repercussions
Mercy feels
driven to save her brother.
Comparables --
The Magus by John Fowles
The Heavens by Sandra Newman
A God in Ruins and Life After Life by Kate
Atkinson
Author
Bio
--
My
published
works include:
The Name of Hero,
historical novel (Houghton Mifflin)
Ethiopia Through Russian Eyes,
translation from the Russian (Red
Sea Press) "...the most important book on the history of
eastern
Africa to have been published for a century...."
Old Africa
The Lizard of Oz satiric fantasy, "An
intriguing and
very entertaining little novel" Library Journal
The AltaVista Search Revolution,
the first consumer book
about search engines (McGraw-Hill) "indispensable"
Library
Journal, Winner of the Distinguished Technical Communication
Award, the highest
award given by the Society for Technical Communication
Publications.
Web Business Bootcamp (Wiley)
complete
list
at http://seltzerbooks.com/books/seltzer.html
Now
a publisher of 3000 public domain electronic books, I worked for
DEC, the minicomputer
company, for 19 years, as writer, marketing consultant, and
"Internet
Evangelist." I graduated from Yale, with a major in English, and
earned an
MA from the U. of Mass. at Amherst in Comparative Literature
(French, Russian,
and German). At Yale, I had creative writing courses with Robert
Penn Warren
and Joseph Heller.
My web site seltzerbooks.com gets 50,000-75,000
hits/months.