Eleven years ago, I had occasion to read Scattershot, an e-book and the first novel from a promising young author, Richard Goodwin, whom I had come to know as a friend and colleague during a period of three years while we both were teaching ESL to international students at Kansas State University. I have stayed in touch with him, or rather he has never asked to be removed from a list of friends that often receive my accounts of an assortment of family- and career-happenings via e-mail.

I think I knew he was still teaching ESL at his new location, in the Pacific Northwest, and he is one of those friends that you really appreciate having any opportunity to visit with, mainly because he keeps the conversation lively and interesting. When I traveled to Riyadh for a stint as teacher-researcher at King Saud University, in early 2012, in the first weeks, I caught a flu that was compounded by not properly covering my mouth and nose walking through a terrible dust storm, and I was seriously considering just getting on a flight back home to Kansas, when out of nowhere I received a phone call via Internet from Richard Goodwin, asking how I was doing. I told him my "sob story" and he told me that he felt it was his responsibility to tell me what his own father would have told him: don't give up so quickly, you might regret not having stayed to enjoy the whole experience. That "pep talk" contributed to my further deliberations and my ultimate decision to "stay the course."

Recently, just five weeks ago, my friend Richard Goodwin e-mailed me to share the news that he has finished his much anticipated second novel, The Split, a 303-page paperback for sale on Amazon. On impulse and without reflection, I bought it online, and it was delivered in just a few days to my home, in Kansas. Now, for someone like me -- born in Kansas, raised in Kansas (except for preschool and early grades in Staten Island and Norfolk), and a graduate of a Kansas public high school as well as having earned degrees at our two most prestigious public universities (K.U. and K-State) -- it was hard-going to read the first 20 pages or so of this novel, with the protagonist, Ken Letter, belly-aching in that irritating fashion that easterners have of denigrating anything and everything west of the Mississippi River or, in the extreme, especially for New Yorkers, all that lies west of the Hudson.

Yet at the same time that is who Ken Letter is -- a New Yorker from Long Island who, together with his wife, Elfie, have moved a few years earlier way out to Ragland, Kansas, for him to take a nice ESL teaching job at the local university. And the third-person narrator tells the reader with great precision everything that is on Ken Letter's mind throughout this eclectic stream of consciousness story while also reporting in wonderful detail the conversations between Ken and Elfie, Ken and a fellow teacher "Stu," Ken and the English program director, Paul, Ken and a certain police officer, twice, Ken and Saipan-resident Helen, Ken and Dwight, who sells him something important near the end of the novel, and brief dialogues between Ken and a few others of the minor players who complete the weave-patterns in the compelling tapestry of life that author Richard Goodwin has created here. It is well worth the investment of your time to read this novel, especially if you have lived a bit and weathered the vicissitudes of life a bit yourself.

I will repeat here a qualifying statement from the review I wrote 11 years ago regarding his first novel, because these same potential concerns are relevant for this new novel, The Split, as well:

Goodwin has a very light touch as an author, and the reader will appreciate how he allows the story to tell itself. Some of the subject matter that arises would not be appropriate for younger readers or for anyone with Victorian sensibilities or conservative religious beliefs. Yet each situation is handled delicately and gracefully by this very accomplished author.

That said, I have not had such a good time as this novel provided since perhaps three years ago, when reading Tommy Orange's There, There, or longer ago with Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos, Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree, or Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead. The protagonist in Richard Goodwin's novel, Ken Letter, comes to know himself and appreciate the wonder of life as a result of an unpredictable sequence of events which he is propelled into by the starting action of this spell-binding story, when his wife of ten years, Elfie, suddenly moves out, suggesting they both take some time to reflect, separately, on the state of their marital relationship.

Recent photograph of Richard Goodwin, novelist

There is a frankness and honesty in the prose that an older and wiser, continually evolving novelist, Richard Goodwin, is writing today. I myself set aside several things I was reading, and even postponed one or two projects, in order to open up time in my schedule as I returned eagerly each day to read a little more of this great story. I would go so far as to say that the author has captured a bit of the zeitgeist of the times in which we are living, yet the setting precedes further convolutions America and the world currently are going through, caused by Covid-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So, in the midst of our present world that is changing at breathtaking speed, it is almost as if Goodwin's novel takes us back to a comparatively simpler time, even if only half a decade removed from where we stand today. There is a timeless quality about this story that I loved, and there was that all-too familiar feeling of sadness as I turned to the final page and started to say farewell. I wonder if Goodwin's "Ken" pleaded with the author not to end the story, as the protagonist does in Miguel de Unamuno's Niebla. I can hardly wait -- and I hope it's not going to be 11 years again -- for his next novel.

Report by Robb Scott
editor@multilingualadaptive.net

2022 The Multilingual Adaptive Systems Newsletter