Be ready for the rollercoaster highs and lows of love in Tom Tolnay’s “Reading Old Books” (Atmosphere Press, 2023). The bland title masks the teasers inside: “How Herman Melville Saved My Life” and “The Iambic Pentameter of Intimacy.” Tolnay calls the two novellas “farce” -ludicrous, improbable, ridiculous, full of hilarious surprise - but in his hands, farce reaches far into his characters’ innermost desires and rewards the reader with renewal of faith through the tragi-comedy of being human.
He’s a fox, that Tom Tolnay. Leave it to him to turn an overdue library book into a life-changing revelation for all the zanies - our hero (the library clerk), the overbearing head librarian, the book-thieving library board member, and the clerk’s alcoholic landlady. Eric Binde, the clerk in question, is the lucky one. Just when it seems all is lost, he saves the library from financial ruin and closure, he retrieves the rare book, and he gets his dream job: to get paid for reading! He emerges a happier man, less at odds with everyone and shorn of his misanthropic reduction of everyone to his or her farcical stereotype, including his own, thanks to heart-felt confessions from the thief, the library, and unlikeliest of all, his landlady. Nobody has been living the life they want. But in the end, they want the life they lead.
In “The Iambic Pentameter of Intimacy,” the stakes are even higher, the twists and turns more abrupt and risky for Jasper Keats, the other protagonist devoted to a life of “reading dilapidated volumes of forgotten lore.” Lore gladly forgotten, I should say, by the high school students who resist his efforts to initiate them into the pleasures of the classics. Strangely enough, his predilection for - indeed his addiction to - the poetry of romance wins him first a divorce from his social-climbing spouse and then a surprise soulmate in the real estate agent Beatrice, who sells their house - to herself, no less - and then invites Jasper to come live with her and be her love in the very house he’d moved out of! What puzzles Jasper is how his new love came to be conditioned (as he thinks) to be sexually “supercharged” when he reads poetry to her. John Keats turns her on to Jasper Keats. But the mysterious intimacies of the novella are hardly gratuitous, and Jasper is no predator, and his lover Beatrice no victim. The united power of language and love makes what Tolnay says is an “audacious claim that life is not entirely without meaning.” When all is almost certain about to be lost - Jasper’s job, Beatrice’s agency, and the house that brought them together - they hold fast to each other. Such is the heart of romance.
Tom Tolnay lives in Delhi. His novels and short stories and scripts have been widely published and anthologized in such venues as The New York Times, Ellery Queen, Saturday Evening Post, The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock, and many more. He founded Birch Brook Press, publisher of literary poetry, novels and short stories.
Reviewer Robert Bensen conducts the Seeing Things Poetry Workshop for Bright Hill Press and Literary Center. His most recent book is “What Lightning Spoke: New and Selected Poems.”
