I went back about three days later and gave her the verdict. I didn’t just like it, I loved it. I can understand why certain kinds of readers driven by excitement—car chases, complicated love affairs, alien invasions, and the like—would not find this book to their taste. Nor would readers who seek out edgy or intellectually sophisticated experimental prose find much in this book to relate to. Some might find it corny, or too slow. Some may be put off by some of the religious overtones, which are present but not done heavy-handedly.
But if you’re open to reading a character-based book which takes seriously the question of what it means to be a compassionate and responsible person in a world that too often seems to reward those with the loudest voices, I don’t think you’ll find anything quite like Theo of Golden. It’s a very quiet book whose main character embodies a set of subtle and decidedly un-hip notions about what it might mean to live well.
Theo—we don’t learn his full name until late in the book—is a man in his mid-80s who grew up in Portugal and spent a lot of his adult life in New York City. He turns up one day in the (fictional) small town of Golden, Georgia, and spends his first few days there walking around and getting to know the town a little bit. He becomes a regular at a coffee shop called The Chalice. He likes the vibe there, and starts returning regularly. The main line of the story develops when he notices and begins to study the artwork on the walls of the shop:
On the left, right, and rear walls were portraits, ninety-two of them in total, done in pencil on white paper and in black frames of three sizes. All had obviously been done by the same artist. And, as if to reflect the customers in the shop at that moment, the collection included a full range of humanity —age, race, and expression. Portraits and portraits and more portraits.
Even from the distance between himself and those framed faces, Theo perceived the richness of detail and delicacy with which they had been rendered. There was a quality to them, an aliveness, that would almost make one believe the people portrayed were spectators of the Chalice rather than mere adornments on the walls. (7)
Theo asks the owner, Shep Carlisle, about the portraits, and is told that they are the work of a local artist, and that the people depicted are all shop customers who live in Golden. But for some reason, Shep tells him, the portraits have not been selling. Theo decides that he will buy some of them and present them as gifts to the people portrayed. That decision is the engine that drives the events of the story. After purchasing a picture, he hand-writes a letter to the person depicted and invites them to meet him at a bench in the local park, so that he can gift them the portrait. In this manner, we are introduced to each character, one at a time, and we are able witness to the interaction between each of them and Theo. Of particular interest are the moments when Theo speaks with them about the impressions he has of them from having carefully studied the portraits, and the ways in which they are able to affirm or correct his initial impressions.
One of the great pleasures of reading this book is in its rendering of the backstories of each of these individuals. As Theo describes them, the portraits themselves are perceptive and masterfully rendered by the artist. But Allen Levi’s clear and precise descriptions of these individuals and the circumstances of their lives are no less perceptive and no less masterful.
There are of course conflicts that arise, and there are characters in the book who are every bit as contentious and complicated as the people you might run into on a busy day in your local supermarket. But the effect of Levi’s narration is to bring us into a pleasant and fully realized fictional world.
In the beginning, many of the locals have their guard up. Many are mistrustful of this stranger’s motives and wary that it must be some kind of scam. But Theo’s gentle and attentive manner, not to mention his generosity in the bestowal of these gifts, wins them over. They come to accept him and befriend him. Of course, they have questions, and they are the questions that generate interest for us as readers as well. Who is this guy? Where did he come from? Why did he come here? Why is he doing this? By the end of the book, all of those questions have been answered, for the townspeople and for us as readers.
Levi’s prose style, as I suggested above, is unadorned but effectively pictorial. The passage below comes in the middle of the book when Theo is thinking back to an encounter he had as a young boy walking along the shores of a river in his home town in Portugal, an encounter which sparks what turns out for him to be a lifelong engagement with an interest the world of art:
Near the boat on the riverbank stood a fisherman whom Theo had never seen before. The man wore high rubber boots, a short-brimmed cap, and the working clothes of a commoner. His heavy shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, was stained with the evidence of a day's catch. He was stocky and muscular, a fact that became clearer as Theo walked toward the man. Heavy stubble highlighted his strong, square jawline. Thick eyebrows guarded dark, serious eyes.
At first, Theo could not tell what the fisherman was doing. As he stepped closer, however, he realized the man was painting a picture, standing at an artist's easel, facing west. The man held a palette with small bowls of color in his left hand and a paintbrush in his right. His eyes were fixed intently on the sunset and the distant shore…
Theo stood behind the stranger, with only a few feet between them, and watched as the western horizon took shape in miniature on the canvas. With each brushstroke, the fisher-painter's sinewy arms rippled, as they did, no doubt, when he pulled at his net or fishing lines. In both cases, the man was in quest of a catch. At the moment, he was intent on catching the sky in front of him. (175-6)
The passage continues and gains significance as it does so. But what impresses me the most about the passage is the precision with which the man and the moment are captured. The closing metaphor of “catching the sky in front of him” also gives us a window into the way that Theo’s mind works. He’s an attentive, curious, thoughtful kid who grows up into an attentive, curious, thoughtful adult. With a lot of bumps along the way.
I’m a little late to the party with this one; it was published in 2023. But as Ann Patchett likes to say in her Instagram posts, “If you haven’t read this book, it’s new to you.” I recommend that if you have not read it, you might at least want give it a try. You’ll know after ten pages or so whether it is going to speak to you as it speaks to me.
