Synopsis

LIVING IN THE O is the first book of a trilogy about an idealistic cad named Olney Garkle. The trilogy follows his quest for a hassle-free life somewhere on earth, a planet he is fast coming to regard as little more than a reincarnation colony for the willfully ignorant.

In his mid thirties, Olney has returned to America after several years of travel in Europe and Asia. Exhausted and broke, his goal--in spite of the above inkling--is to have a modest job with modest bills in the mailbox of a modest apartment. He also wants to begin the book that has been nagging him for years; a book which he hopes will give vent to his greatest outrage: the triumph of politics over people; and resolve his greatest conflict: the battle between lust and spirituality.

Thwarting Olney's plan is a lifetime of purposeful irresponsibility. He doesn't really want a job; he wants the money it offers. As for his book, he wishes it were already written. His tendency to pick up and leave when the going gets boring has earned him an "F" in discipline and a spotty job history. In fact, he no longer has a job history, and his occasional bursts of creativity have produced but a handful of colorful letters to friends.

To many, Olney Garkle is a man whose guileless response to life represents Everyman unmasked. Others, however, see him as a parasitic swine whose frontal lobes are too often at the mercy of his animal brain. Because he is affable and lovable, Olney has endeared himself to those who would rather hate him for his theatrical arrogance and self-indulgence. His old friends have once again been conned into loaning him money to get started, but the Olney they love and loathe soon reverts to his old ways: living it up (albeit modestly) on borrowed money. He has a taste for the finer things, a man who should have been born with a silver spoon poised over life's bowl of cherries. Instead, he is faced with an almost certain future among the wretched of earth. Olney is caught on the hamster's wheel of life with three possible exits: reestablishing himself in society as a worker bee; becoming one of society's emerging underclass; lifting himself out of the samsara which includes them both. His efforts to make a choice form the essence of the trilogy.

LIVING IN THE O takes place in Canada and Paris sometime during the 1980's. Unable to adjust to the slavering greed of Reagan's New America, Olney goes to British Columbia to visit old friends. There he meets Maggie Bebette, a sort of bumpkin Lulu (that's Louise Brooks, not Tubby's girlfriend), and, at her whimsical suggestion, finds himself returning to Europe almost immediately. Their Canadian friends, earnest dwellers in the microcosm of the present locality, are astonished. A brief liaison, they reason, would do both a world of good, but an extended stay in the land of impossible vowels would be madness. Their pocketbooks are on alert as well; not because of Maggie, who has always been conscientious with the making and spending of money, but because of Olney, who has been, is now, and will always be, broke.

The book is essentially a love story between two misfits whose character deficits are revealed against the backdrop of Paris, the city where L'Amour is supposed to be anything but ludicrous. We see that Olney cannot stand obstacles (the Real World) and lives largely within the fulminating perversities and outraged idealism of his mind. Maggie, on the other hand, regards each obstacle as a challenge; it is her capricious mind that frightens her.

Through French friends of Olney's, the two sublet an apartment in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, and there play at being a couple. The chapters follow one another in an idyll of little ups and downs until finances force them to rent one of the rooms. Over Maggie's protestations, Olney insists the renter be female, and indeed their new boarder is a lovely student with whom he falls madly in lust. His bungled attempts at seduction culminate in an operatic scene of sexual slapstick. All comes to a foiled end, with no eurekas of recognition or even satisfactory orgasms to take away as souvenirs. At the end of the book, what is left for the boarder is an apartment to herself, for Maggie bewilderment and hurt, and for Olney remorse. But as the reader learns, his remorse lasts only as long as that period of time between erections.

The significance of the title is made clear at the end of the second chapter. It refers to the '40's/'50's graffito, "Kilroy was here," and to the first letter of the word "outsider."

The second book, THE MOON FOOD CAFE, takes place at the cafe of the title during one afternoon some months later, the relationship with Maggie Bebette having failed miserably. Olney has decided that Reagan or no, he must make an effort in the land of his birth.

Located in California, The Moon Food Cafe is one of those ubiquitous Chinese-American eateries whose menus were dittoed in the year dot. Apart from several surreal scenes of black comedy involving Olney, the cafe's clientele, and the Chinese waitress (whose nametag reads "Helga"), this book further examines the events of Olney's zany life and, in particular, the past few weeks--his pathetic attempts to secure any one of an absurd assortment of jobs--which have brought him to this unsavory crossroads.

The device of dialogues with an inner self is used throughout. In the closing sections, this device is used in the form of an ongoing testy argument between Olney, representing the will to evolve out of density, and the self he calls his "uncle," who represents the will to rut.

The book ends as Olney leaves the cafe just before it closes. His vow to make himself over--to gain insight and self-discipline through the written word, and above all, to be a positive force in the negative world--is made with great trepidation. The reader is left to wonder if he will succeed.

The significance of the title of this book refers to G. I. Gurdjieff's suggestion (P.D. Ouspensky, "In Search of the Miraculous," p.85) that all organic life on Earth is food for the Moon, a living, growing planet. Only by developing consciousness and will, said G., can we liberate ourselves from the mechanical thinking and behaviour controlled by the Moon. Whether ludicrous or insightful, this author could not resist the metaphor.

Book three, with a working title, JOURNAL OF AN INSECT LIVING IN EXCREMENT, is taken from "journals" Olney kept during his travels before the time of the first two books and the journals he is now keeping in the outskirts of a village in the French Pyrenees. The juxtaposition of former and current journals, revealing his progressive fragmentation, is mirrored by events in the outside world. This connection is made through his weekly contact with the locals, both French and foreign, in the nearest town. The failure of Communist socialism and the naked excesses of unopposed capitalism are seen as the underlying cause for the derailment of human evolution in this century. The book is currently in progress.

Harold Hark