Customer Reviews

Gone Tomorrow

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Some authors own the genre of mysteries, thrillers, love stories, or outdoor adventure. But P.F. Kluge owns the give and take intimacy of small college relationships: politics, expectations, taboos and awakening minds. This is a love story, but not the romantic type. It is a love story for a lifetime of nuturing of relationships created in a small liberal arts college. It is an explanation of the fictional life of a writer-in-residence, George Canaris who has turned away from the expectations of others and their definition of success, and instead become intoxicated with awakening young minds to write and express themselves.
It is extravagant in captured metaphor and wisdom. The essence of writing: "I hope that what matters to me will matter to others." The sense of loss and loneliness of a retired professor: "..if you have no students in front of you, your life thins out. It's like an abandoned bird's nest, a few twigs and feathers waiting for a strong wind." The pettiness of academic politics: "With him the applause was based on enthusiasm, not reverence, and it kept growing as he approached. There was no counting the number of faculty enemies he'd already made."
In the end we see the interweaving intricacy and intimacy of a small college campus, seen close up through a long looking glass. And if one looks back through that glass, at the other end, way far away we can see the author with his beast.

P.E. Scranton Jr.

I've been waiting for another book by Kluge to come along for years, when I saw this one in Entertainment Weekly I jumped at the chance to get my hands on a copy early at the bookstore up the street. I wasn't disappointed. Gripping and inspiring to be sure, but hilarious too. Truly just laugh out loud funny. I don't know anyone else who can capture witty banter quite like Kluge- it's as though Aaron Sorkin met reality. I recommend it highly... I just wish there was more- reads really fast. You'll be hooked from the first line:

"George Canaris is the first faculty member of this college in half a century whose death merited an obituary in The New York Times. He was our best-known professor, one of those outsized characters who arrives in an obscure place and makes it his own. "A writer, a critic, a professor, a campus legend and a national figure, the very embodiment of the liberal arts," the Times obituary said. And a mystery. He was the author of two well-received novels and a book of essays, all published more than 30 years ago. Taken together, they were the beginnings of an impressive shelf to which, in all his years here in Ohio, he added nothing. "Compared to Faulkner and Dos Passos at the start of his career," The Times observed, "in the end he resembled Harper Lee."

Set in a small liberal arts college in an even smaller Ohio town, this book examines the strained fit of a celebrity writer/professor among purely academic types, the diminishment of the currency of celebrity, and the willingness of college administrators to succumb to public relations and superficial measures to enhance their and the college's image, even at the expense of long-time employees. And then there are the joys, frustrations, and difficulties of teaching with the necessity of delivering the news to students that their high school teachers had much oversold their talents and beginning their education from the ground up.

George Canaris was starting to get a reputation as a superb writer in the 1960s, having published two well-received books and being well-known around Hollywood circles. His acceptance of an offer to teach in an obscure Ohio town in the early 1970s seemed odd, unlikely to last, but the wild card in his move was the pressure to write another outstanding book. Would a small college town be inspirational or did it represent an avenue for escape? Prof Canaris settled into the small town, gaining a small group of friends, and found enjoyment in the occasional student with a gift for writing. While not a womanizer, per se, his intellectual, paternalistic role was attractive to female students resulting in one ten year relationship. The prospective book referred to as The Beast lurked, however, a subject for many to ponder, which clouded his relationships and standing with the college.

It's not a spoiler to say that the first line of the book refers to Canaris' flattering obit in the NY Times, which propels the book into his past including a search for the mysterious The Beast by his literary executor. What is found rather quickly is a memoir written by Canaris over the last year after his forced retirement and his various rounds of ceremonial appearances, some of which backfired on the college. The memoir is actually the main part of this book - a book within a book -and details Canaris' teaching and his last year, but also reveals that he conceived of The Beast as being concerned with the horrors of the Nazi occupation of Carlsbad of the Czech Republic in 1938 and the travails of those who escaped or did not. Perhaps The Beast is more illusion than reality, but the reader gets to share his thinking as Canaris makes two visits to Carlsbad.

Canaris is a good fellow but remains rather enigmatic: his motivations, relationships, plans, etc. Yet, the book is very readable and revelatory about the environment that those who would choose the college life are likely to encounter: politics, dilemmas, constraints, pressures, and the like. Interestingly, the author provides a certain amount of commentary on various writers as to their being overrated or underrated.

PS. The typos and anomalies mentioned by some are trivial with no impact on the book.

I'm somewhat impulsive in my reading habits, so if something doesn't grab me quickly --within the first 5 pages or so-- I usually chuck it and move on. Which means I've probably missed out on a lot of slow starting but worthy books over the years. In the case of "Gone Tomorrow", I was initially underwhelmed, but for some reason, kept going. Maybe it's because I've always been tantalized by novels of academe--with their promise of greed, vanity, unseemly competition, backbiting, student-professor relationships, husband-wife conflicts, tenure struggles and all the other segments of this rich vein of literary fiction. In Kluge's case, he eventually pulls it all off remarkably well--an exquisite blend of plot, faux memoirs, atmospherics and depth of character development. Very highly recommended to those interested in this genre. (I was, however, annoyed by two or three typos toward the end of the book which distacted me and actually confused the meaning of the text. Better editing is advised for future editions).

The bulk of P.F. Kluge's Gone Tomorrow purports to be a manuscript that was found among the belongings of the late George Canaris, whose three previous books had landed him in the canon of must-read 20th century authors. Canaris became a writer in residence at a no-name Ohio college at the height of his fame, eager for a place that would give him the space to write his magnum opus, "The Beast," as he referred to it. But against all expectations Canaris stayed on at the school for more than thirty years and never published another book. His failure to come out with anything new lent him a Salinger-esque mystique, but his status slowly slipped from celebrity author on campus to beloved but has-been professor.

The manuscript Canaris left for his literary executor, Mark May, to find in his freezer isn't The Beast. It's an account of his last year at the college (2005), when he was forced out by the administration to make room for new blood. These chapters in the present time alternate with those describing his earlier years at the school, so that it becomes an account of Canaris' life and career across thirty years of teaching. This book within a book, also titled Gone Tomorrow, is preceded by a twenty-odd page introduction supplied by May, who explains the background of the manuscript and offers a precis of Canaris's career. May introduces the idea that Canaris was wont to blur the boundary between fact and fiction in his writing, so that one enters Canaris's narrative ready to question the veracity of the account. The principal question is, was Canaris in fact working on The Beast all those years, as he claims in his book? Or was he perpetrating a kind of fraud for decades and buttressing it with a final manuscript that left readers unsure of the truth?

George Canaris, dead already when Kluge's book begins, comes to life in the pages of his memoir. He is an entirely believable character whose death we come after the fact to regret. And the book offers a lovely discussion of the seasons of a life, the ephemerality of experience, the importance of memory. My one complaint is that the book should have ended with the end of Canaris's manuscript, which would have left the mysteries of The Beast and Canaris's veracity intact. Instead, the book closes with an afterword by May that neatly ties up our questions, or most of them, and in the process, I think, diminishes the impact of the book. Better to be left guessing in the end.


-- Debra Hamel

When I picked up Gone Tomorrow, I was expecting a sensitive novel about failed ambitions. The cover flap promised a sort of mid-western "Good-bye Mr. Chips," a gentle and poignant reminder of one teacher's legacy. I was not prepared for the scathing wit of Kluge's novel, nor its depth.

George Canaris, a novelist of fame and stature, has accepted a job in an isolated mid-western college in order to hunker down and write the Great American Novel - which he calls "The Beast." And Beast it is, covering his family's past, present - as well as the transformation of Sudetenland during WWII and its aftermath, the Cold War, not to mention Life, The Universe and Everything. Canaris' Beast is truly a monster. Somewhat perversely, Canaris refuses to talk about The Beast, or show a word of the manuscript to anyone, until, after 30 years, very few people actually believe he has written it. Eventually, Canaris is canned for lack of productivity, and dies shortly thereafter under mysterious circumstances. The book leaves us with two mysteries - who killed Canaris (if indeed it was murder), and does The Beast, that long-awaited novel of novels actually exist?

It is the second question that gave me pause. The Beast clearly represents more than a novel. As a "life-work" it represented an actual life - any life, or perhaps all of our lives. The issues Canaris grapples with - the relevance of the past, the significance of memory, the inevitability of loss - are things we all must consider as we struggle with our own "Beasts."

Kluge is a wonderful writer - witty, wise, erudite, intelligent - with much to say about academia, the process of writing, our hopelessly sped-up world. And I'm looking forward to reading his other books. I only hope that the copy editor who repeatedly and almost doggedly mangled this marvelous text has left the world of publishing. A writer of Kluge's talent and vision certainly deserves better.

For the first half of this novel, I wasn't quite sure what it was. In Chapter 1, we learn about the mysterious death of a college professor, George Canaris. Was this going to be a mystery? Based on the book blurb, I expected that. Most of this novel (about 90% of it), though, is a memoir written by the recently killed professor. It alternates chapters between Canaris's final year of teaching, when retirement is forced upon him, and the start of his college teaching career. That bio eventually covers his whole thirty year tenure at this small Ohio college (probably modeled after Kenyon, where the author teaches). The start of this bio section of the book felt like a number of other insider looks at college teaching. I felt that I had seen all that in Russo's Straight Man. Interesting enough, but not new or engaging. About halfway through this book, I found myself suddenly engaged with Canaris and both his teaching life and his struggles as a famous author who struggled to write another novel. I equally enjoyed the chapters on Canaris's bittersweet final year as a professor and the chapters covering his 30 year teaching career at the college. I didn't think about the fact that Canaris was dead, and gave very little thought as to who might have killed him. I cared about him, and the big mystery was whether he had in fact worked on his fourth novel, The Beast, for three decades. Looking back on the book, I'd rate the first half a semi-enjoyable 3 stars, while the second half was a 5 star effort. By the end, I liked this novel a lot and do recommend it. It's a bit of a celebration of literature and teaching, and I was moved by it.

I enjoyed this novel by PF Kluge, a gentle, heartfelt account of a lifetime professor's last year at a small Midwestern liberal arts college. I was thinking of Richard Russo (the quiet humor and small-town sense of time passing, which is to say very slowly) and sometimes, again because of the humor and rural setting, of Garrison Keillor. I was shocked, however, as other reviewers have been, by the atrocious copyediting. Unless our professor suddenly either developed a Cockney accent or invented a new verb, "odged" is not a word (as in to "odge" a complaint, as one character does)--and this is but one error in a book rife with them. I realize it's nearly impossible to release a book without one typo. But this degree of carelessness does a grave disservice to the story and the book itself, and it's a mild insult to the reader who's shelled out money for it. I would advise the author either request new editors or make sure not to depend solely on others' proofreading skills (or lack thereof).

I read a library copy of this book last year and recently decided it's one of the very few novels I want for rereading over the years. So I bought it.

I admit being prejudiced because our son graduated from Kenyon College in 1997 and I love revisiting it even in fictional form. The author got it right in his farewell speech at the end.

But the novel would work in whatever college it was set.

George Canaris, author of a book included in a list of the top 100 American novels, comes to a college in Ohio (thinly veiled as Kenyon) to teach and to write. Upon his arrival he is warned that "this is a place that eats careers, ambitions, talent. It will destroy you if you let it. Not maliciously. Fondly, smilingly, appreciatively. It will flow into every crevice of your life, occupy every vacuum, claim every moment of rest and silence, if you let it[.] Though he planned to teach for a short time, Canaris falls in love with the college and its people and soon finds himself engulfed by that love. Quickly he gains a reputation as a legendary professor, but eventually as a joke since there is no evidence that he has continued writing even though he often talks of working on his "Beast."

Shortly after the college president forces the professor to retire, Canaris dies from a hit-and-run accident. While going through Canaris's belongings, his literary executor discovers Canaris had written a book about his final year as writer-in-residence at the college. It is in the telling of his story that we see a man observant of endings, loss, dreams and creative potential as well as life in the academic world.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel with its sense of place since I teach writing in a small liberal arts college in Ohio. I, however, particularly liked the book because the author made me care for the characters, even those who serve a small role in the plot of Canaris's life. If you want to spend a little time back in school, I recommend P. F. Kluge's Gone Tomorrow.