What my novel is about

Excerpt, Chapter 19, of the Concept of White Plaster


It’s like my shrink said:

“How could you possibly be normal?” And so we talked. And she said: “You were truly abused as a child by a monstrous father. You were socially abandoned very young. As a teenager, you fought back in a way that devastated any possible future you could have had. You spent 14 years in a mental hospital misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and put on very powerful antipsychotic medications. There was no possibility of having normal relationships with women. And all along, you’ve probably actually had a form of autism now known as Asperger’s Syndrome. After you left the Hospital, you endured more social disparagement than any normal person would endure. No wonder you’re like you are. Now what?”


“Perhaps, I’ll write a book about the meaning of life,” I said...

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WHAT IS MY NOVEL ABOUT?

HOW BEING MIDDLE-AGED AND AUTISTIC –TOMMY RETURNS TO SCHOOL, STILL HAUNTED WITH UNRESOLVED ISSUES. HE ALMOST DESTROYS HIMSELF WITH CYBERSEX AND HOW –OUT OF THE UNUSUAL INNOCENCE OF ASPERGER’S SYNDROME -- HE DISCOVERS THE TRUTH ABOUT WHY HUMANS ARE AT WAR.

THE BEGINNING?:

AFTER THE MURDER, TOMMY, MISDIAGNOSED AS A PARANOID SCHIZOPHRENIC, NAVIGATES HIS LIFE SENTENCE THROUGH TELLER STATE HOSPITAL ALL THE WHILE HIDING A CERTAIN PROBLEM WITH ANGER MANAGEMENT.

THE ENDING?:

TOMMY ALMOSTS KILLS AGAIN, BUT INSTEAD FINDS WHAT HUMANITY’S MEANING COMES FROM:

ITS SADOMASOCHISTIC NEED TO SEEK OUT VIOLENCE RATHER THAN FACE THE TRUTH ABOUT THE UNIVERSE.

---THIS STORY IS IN VERY REAL DANGER OF NOT BEING TOLD. I AM BROKE. AND I WILL NOT DEAL WITH VANITIES. --N

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Count with Tommy the three evils of this world. One, the silence of God. Two, the mindlessness of life. Three, the cruelty in ourselves. --for cover page.

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Also, a note on Tommy's autistic personality:

What passes for intimacy in Tommy is actually

masturbatory and mental. Many autistic people shun the human touch. In the novel, Tommy engages in many perversions, but mentally, Tommy is actually engaged in a quiet part of his own mind, watching. And it is not actual matters of sex so much but, rather, what the strange cyber sex means. In Tommy’s “investigation” of BDSM, he is really studying the power struggles and power exchanges in the human race. These are all basically based on the almost universal theory of the self that requires human dignity, “honor,” and free will. But the testimony of Tommy’s own brain, so turned inward and watchful, is that all of that is a lie. This is really why this novel is so anti-social.


In this author’s own life, I have indeed generally shunned the human touch. And because of this tendency, many bad things have happened to me in the arena of human disparagement and ridicule. For “It is a luxury to be understood.” If THE CONCEPT OF WHITE PLASTER succeeds in helping you understand, it will have to do it through the very obliqueness of the story.
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I am given to "living in my mind." --Hence, my preference for abstraction and metaphor. And I love words. At the State Hospital, I was constantly reading the poetry of T.S. Eliot, E.E. Cummings, and the special poems of others, most of the sort written in the first part of the twentieth century. The general tenor of my thinking reflects that I was born after the end of World War II. In the aftermath of the first big war and then with the passing of Hitler, the Cold War became the deep issue. In the general mental idea that I have of the time that I was born into, I have this vision of a world polluted by radiation and poisons. The world, in my view, tried out Nietzsche--and then decided that it preferred the Prayer Tower of Oral Roberts. It is only the complexion of such ghastly juxtapositions that is hidden from us now. I am very afraid that the happy face of happy "Faith" will fail. But the only way that humans survive, generation to generation, is to find (as in poem by Cummings): "...there's a hell of a good universe next door. Let's go!"

Two acute crises have happened to the American psyche in the time that I have been on this planet: the assassination of Kennedy, and 9-11. Vietnam was not acute. It was chronic, as are many of the problems with our mental formations, generally. My novel would not have even started if not for those planes that flew into those buildings just a few short years ago. My writing has so much to do with psychology. Like Tommy, in my novel, I do look at the behavior of people and imagine their interior worlds. That is why I cut most everyone some slack. I know how hard human life can be. Novelvision