Hello all,
I am looking for feedback on the first chapter of the first novel I am attempting writing.
Its a bildungsroman and follows Casper Cutlas as he attempts to find a "vocation" in life, i.e something he feels pulled too. The first chapter is below. Please tear it apart, I am an english major and have grown accustomed to the praxis. Thank you all.
Chapter One
I had always expected myself to be someone who didn’t settle down to the life I grew up in. I craved variety in life and grew bored with the vanilla flavor by the time I was thirteen or fourteen. When you are born into a good life it takes years to fully realize the blessing you inherited, and such a realization only occurs when you mature into an age that can make a true distinction between a good life and a bad one. Of course, maturity comes on a case-to-case basis. For some, maturity comes easy and is attained sometime around high school graduation, for others it takes longer for that process to be completed. Personally, for me, I realized my blessings early, due to growing up in the church. I was always thankful for the life I had been granted, for I was taught the awareness to be so. Yet, after my college graduation, I became perplexed by the innate need for more and the Christian principle of paralysis.
For a long while I was stuck in the sprigs of spring. There was no direction that I seemed to be pulled too and for a year I traveled the country visiting my friends. Traveling was an illusion. It gave me a sense of direction—physically. Really though, through that period, like a ceiling fan, I was suspended in motion. Eventually, as I lay on the grass and contemplated the big questions of life, those questions raised to forget that inevitable mortgage, my parents began to quietly push me to a life that wasn’t dependent on their dime. Even my own sense of detached responsibility, which was more so a liberty loaned by privilege than a selfish thing, began to stir. I understood thoroughly that I owed my parents a secure life lived. So, using my parent's connections, by Fall of ‘19 I was a tenured teacher at a high school in the small suburban town I seemed unable to escape from.
I had a good deal then, something I took for granted. I was making 50k a year without a phone bill or any other bills to pay besides a car payment at three hundred a month. Further, I had become well-liked by the student body and respected by the older members of the faculty for my ability to percolate literary interest in my juniors. Still considered a member of the younger generation, I understood the ideas and beliefs of my students. This gave me insight on which buttons to push and which books to teach, which would ultimately percolate that interest spontaneously. Opening with a quote from a writer or a person of good literary repute, the tone in the classroom would be set, which was always a harmonious chord of independence and belief in self as I would tell my students that those quotes and these books we’d read were spoken and written by someone who was once like them. Then, we would begin that day’s lesson, which was always more or less the same. The lesson I taught to my students' day in and day out was to use the subject matter of my classroom to sharpen their worldviews. I pleaded with them to add these ideas to their tool belts. The poetry in some of the books I taught would provide the empowering part of the lesson, for each author I taught held an optimistic belief in the world without failing to illustrate the issues it faces. My students loved this type of education. It kept them engaged because they realized they had skin in the game. And by mid-semester, they had grown to view thinking not as something dull but as something useful. My students became acquainted with the power of imagination, arming themselves with its unique ability to create solutions. Finally, in closing, I would remark that, first and foremost, trust the beliefs you hold over everything, and that part of doing so, in maintenance, is to enjoy your youth, for the sprigs of spring will soon yellow.
Even amidst a successful beginning to a meaningful and worthwhile career, I couldn’t shake the clash between an appetite for more and a staunch belief in paralysis. I began an effort to decide what was more moral to get my feet moving. After a few weeks, I concluded that it wasn’t a tale of morality, for as Americans we are taught to pursue happiness—at least some of us are—and as a result the selfishness of those two words when combined are omitted. But I also knew that those two words when combined are used to illustrate the American Dream—something believed to be buried underneath soil and marble. However, such a dream isn’t exactly dead. For normal people not born into the gentry of America, the Dream is simply a secure life in a nice home surrounded by nice people whose children attend nice schools: something entirely attainable, perhaps more so today than ever before. My parents for instance attained the Dream themselves. So, the question then became: what does one do if one is born into the Dream? My first instinct is always to build, so as to compound the blessings I was given. But that meant, for me, a rather affluent life was required. I was free to pursue individual achievements, which would lead to building a structure on the foundation bequeathed to me. Still, such a thing seemed selfish to pursue. Yet, at the same time, to carve my own path as my parents carved theirs, that path was the only path left to walk upon. Soon I realized I had to choose between more or the same. Which was right, I hadn’t a clue.
It took me four years to decide. Four years of thought, every day, regarding the same question. In that time the magic of my first classes soon faded—the students became faces of the same, for each person is more similar than they realize. For every class clown, there is a bookworm, and for every bookworm, there is an astonishingly intelligent cheerleader. Each archetype of student required roughly the same combination to become unlocked as their predecessor did; it was easy then. I had grown into form as a teacher. After a few years, the only distinctions of note became the names, which is, I suppose, the purpose of such a concept... names. I began to feel like an assembly line worker: giving the products the necessary adjustments so they sell and are of worth to someone. More so, my subject matter never changed because the curriculum stayed stagnant. This issue was particularly taxing as I would be reading Delillo or Johnson privately, and if I found their ideas at all relevant to what we were discussing as a class, I had no way of introducing those authors because they didn’t fit the bill. Once the mythical quality of teaching was gone, I had an epiphany that I had already made the choice between paralysis and the more: I had stayed a teacher and by failing to choose a direction, by default, I chose paralysis. This realization was catastrophic; I was routed by the conviction that I would die in my classroom. And so, the summer before my fifth year of teaching, in a fit of passion, I notified the necessaries of my intent to quit. Like a vessel leaving behind a languid harbor for the embrace of a storm-ravaged sea, I ventured west to the decadent constructions of Los Angeles.
The thing about Los Angeles is that, underneath the bright neon lights, there is a load of graffiti. The hills are clothed in concrete. The lone flower sticks out defiantly. Santa Monica, a beautiful shore and a tourist trap full of affluent members of society, a haven for bums seeking shelter from mid-western rain. The beauty of The City is not found in the grandeur of it, but in the arresting contradictions that are ubiquitous; it is everything and nothing at all, all at once.
Upon my advent, I had no true vocation. Thankfully, Los Angeles was the perfect place to find one. In Los Angeles vocations take the place of seasons; instead of the weather turning, the desires of its inhabitants change. The City is a wardrobe of hats and coats, and one size fits all and once you get bored of that ensemble you just go back and pick something else out. At this stage in my life however, I had no intention to wander without a direction once again—the security of my former idyllic life created a much-needed standard, and with it, the tip of an arrow. In my first stroke of liberty, I was able to decide I wanted to be a writer. I had always possessed a restlessness only curbed by creation of some sort. Los Angeles awakened that drive in me.
I would drive past people of all types. Some were small. Some were big. Some people were fat, and others were thin. Each of them strode on concrete. Each of them drove on asphalt. And each of them were shaded by shadows created by skyscrapers that seemed to breach the sky. Each of those people who stood and strode underneath the shade of steel became subjects in the first pieces I began writing.
At first I started small; I would take a person I saw somewhere on my drives, and I’d imagine who they were: what they desired, why they breathed. These stories were not romances, comedies, nor tragedies, but an attempt at invention. The stories failed miserably. None of those pieces were ever published and soon I became disheartened and began to wonder whether writing was the correct path to begin upon.
Paralysis took hold of my hand again. My heart became rigid with concern as I began to realize that the life I had had was a good one. These concerns took form in my dreams. I was visited by a phantom who had no body, only a face of smoke. The eyes were holes that revealed the space the rest of the mass had occupied. It had a single, lifeless hand that reached for my pelvis. Its touch was like fog rolling in from the sea. Its breathing was timid, as if I was what it needed to continue being. Each time this phantom made an appearance, I would awaken, still dreaming. And I would wait five seconds, praying it didn’t notice my stir. Then I would lurch and attempt to push the face into my bed smothering it until its breaths were no longer timid. I would always wake up on my stomach, feeling as though I had fallen from the ceiling. But the phantom was there; I was as sure as the sun shines. I could feel it as I feel the pen in my hand as I write this sentence. Nevertheless, I hated the phantom. But an odd thing happened after a few visits: I was gifted with a sense of urgency. I began to write more than I slept; I began to read more than I ate. Today, I thank the Phantom.
One day during this period of isolated sessions, I stepped outside the void into the summer sun. Around noon I lunched at a small French café and had a cheese omelet with two slices of sourdough on the side. At two o’clock I went to a movie; I allowed myself popcorn and an Icee. Around five o’clock, I caught dinner at the CPK in Hollywood; I had a BBQ chicken pizza and a few drinks. I had forgotten the solid taste of beer and the extreme taste of whiskey; I hadn’t drunk alcohol since college; and soon my heart exhaled. I began to fancy myself a few more drinks and made my way to a bar a few blocks down from my apartment which was on Sunset. I spent a few hours there and made a few friends whose faces escape me now. After a fifth shot and a fourth beer, my mind became stuck between the acute awareness that comes with an evolving buzz and the encroaching obtuseness of drunkenness: I had reached my limit. So, I stumbled out and was met by a burst of sea breeze. It was then that I began to hear a voice call to me: there, there, in a whisper moving through the wind. I asked: where? And the voice said: there, there. The Seabreeze went east, and I went with it, drifting away from the Whiskey and towards the sunset end of Sunset. The voice continued calling but I ignored it. The breeze was my motor. I looked to the sky and watched the clouds drift. The stars were absent; there wasn’t a twinkle in the sky. The only source of light came from a fat marble moon that looked more like a cataract eye. Underneath its gaze, I stumbled on. My vision became distorted. All I could see before me was a never-ending concrete boardwalk that misted away into nothingness. The cars honked and buzzed by, like waves falling and receding. The breeze beat on. After a while, like a flower flitting upon the wind and then falling upon soft grass, I dropped onto the doorstep of a mirage. A pathetic building stood weakly before me. The shingles were peeling away like sunburnt skin. The paint on the eaves was chipped and flaked. The door—a blue one with a gold knob—was covered in graffiti. And the windows on the north and south sides were barred. But on the door, a sign hung, and it read: The Surf, Literary Review. And underneath that sign was another that read: Now Hiring, Inquire Within: Weekdays 9-5.
