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From the bestselling author of The
Sixteen Pleasures comes an unforgettable novel about
a man’s search for meaning, in the tradition of Louis Begley’s
About Schmidt and Evan Connell’s Mr. Bridge.
Rudy Harrington has spent half his life
in a rambling Chicago house, raising three daughters with
his independent-minded wife. But his wife has died, his daughters
have moved away, and Rudy is restless. In what he interprets
as a moment of transcendent vision, he puts the family home
up for sale and buys an avocado grove in Texas. While adapting
to his new vocation, new home, and new friends, Rudy takes
up a book—Philosophy Made Simple—and
begins to struggle with Plato and Aristotle, Hume and Schopenhauer.
His newly acquired wisdom is put to the test when he enlists
the neighborhood elephant to preside over his daughter’s Hindu
wedding and falls in love with the groom’s mother.
Hellenga brings back characters from his
bestselling The Sixteen Pleasures and introduces
many compelling new ones—including the elephant, who
paints—in a novel that illuminates our deepest concerns:
love and death, marriage and family, and the mysterious tug
of beauty on the human heart.
I grew up in Three Oaks, Michigan, a typical
Midwestern small town, but I spent summers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,
where my father, a commission merchant with a seasonal business,
handled produce that was shipped there from what was then
the world’s largest farmers market, in Benton Harbor, Michigan.
The men who worked for my father were almost all Italians,
and in retrospect I see that this is how I got my first sense
of Italy as something opposed to small-town Midwestern Protestant
culture-a theme that has shaped a lot of my writing, including
Philosophy Made Simple.
My wife (Virginia) and I met at the University
of Michigan, spent the first year of our marriage in Belfast,
Northern Ireland, spent a year in North Carolina, and started
having children when I was in gradate school at Princeton.
I’ve taught English literature at Knox
College, in Galesburg, IL, since 1968. During my tenure at
Knox I have directed two programs for the Associated Colleges
of the Midwest, one at the Newberry Library in Chicago and
one in Florence, Italy, and I’ve spent a year at the University
of Chicago on a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.
I started writing fiction at Knox, which
has a strong creative writing program, published my first
story in 1973 and my first novel (after 39 rejections) in
1994. Philosophy Made Simple will be my fourth novel.
The first three are: The Sixteen Pleasures, The Fall of
a Sparrow, and Blues Lessons.
I have three daughters, like King Lear,
but unlike the Lears, we all get along. Rachel is a vice-president
at the Children’s Museum in Chicago; Heather teaches fifth
grade in Galesburg; and Caitrine is a veterinarian in Orlando,
Florida. My wife teaches Latin at Monmouth College.
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