Book: THEO OF GOLDEN
Author: Allen Levi
Published by: Fontana
Price: Rs 499
Unfolding like a hymn sung by a church choir, Allen Levi’s book is a melodious debut. Theo, an elderly man, arrives as a stranger in Golden, a small town in the American South. Fascinated by a local artist’s display of a series of pencil portraits in the neighbourhood coffee shop, Theo buys the portraits one by one and begins gifting them to their subjects. In the process, he leaves an indelible impression
on the community of Golden which grows to embrace him as one of its own.
The world seen through Theo’s eyes is an artist’s masterpiece. Nature, architecture, music, painting, even the depth of flavour of a morning espresso are rendered in luxuriant detail. A litany of different voices contributes to the song the novel makes of itself: Tony, the war veteran-turned-roguish bookseller, Kendrick, the local university’s custodian, Lamisha, Kendrick’s young, art-loving daughter bed-ridden from a car accident, and Ellen, whose love of literature remains undimmed by her homelessness.
Golden is Eden-adjacent, but not a setting without brutality, uncertainty and grief. Whether in memories or present circumstances, loss cuts the characters deep. Theo often recalls his daughter who died as a child; the war in Vietnam haunts Tony constantly; Ellen’s homelessness is harrowing. Amid these horrors, the novel positions faith, specifically Christianity and the church, as solace and refuge. Theo is a devout Christian, a firm believer in Heaven. He finds saintliness in every portrait and points it out in every meeting with the portraits’ subjects. The message is overt: for all the different lives led and trials endured, every human being is capable of grace, kindness and love.
Though the novel’s rising religious current eventually becomes a flood, it never acknowledges the dark and the visceral underbelly of organised religion. Historically, religion has motivated great passions; our current global moment stands testament to the ever-increasing atrocities committed in the name of all gods. In such a world, a narrative with a bared Christian heart, with no space for the ecstatic or the erotic, the filth, grime and bloodied offal of faith, makes a conscious and questionable decision to sanitise. The comfort Theo gives the people he meets is attractive, but built on shaky foundations.
Levi makes a far more earnest attempt to explore the injustices plaguing modern American society. Several vignettes explore the South’s ugly legacy of slavery, racial discrimination, the impossible position of immigrants, a ruthless legal system, corporate greed, the perils and the pitfalls of fame. Acknowledging these troubles sweetens their respite: the intimacy between strangers, the slow building of a loving community,
the central message of hope. “For anything to be good, truly good, there must be love in it”, Theo says of art. It is undeniable that this debut novel by an author in his 70s has at its core love — for its story, its characters and its god.
In a recent announcement, Pantone, the US-based LLC globally renowned for its colour-naming system, declared ‘Cloud Dancer’, a shade of white, as its ‘colour of the year’. The internet was split in two. Some agreed with Pantone’s justification of white as a symbol of tranquil reflection in an overstimulating world. Others found it clinical, falsely neutral and tone-deaf to a cultural moment shaped by vivid and violent currents. With its stark white cover with gold accents, Theo of Golden emerges as a literary ‘Cloud Dancer’. It carries an earnest, even inspiring, hope in humanity but its divinity is defanged, unable or unwilling to bite into its own capacity for darkness.