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Eric Sutherlin This site is intended to promote and distribute the fiction I have written over the years as well as creative work of various kinds by some of my friends. This page begins with a description of the full work and concludes with a section linking to the full text of four of my stories. The work: My work is a series of short novels and short stories that follow the life of a man and various recurring characters over the years from 1973 to the present. The concept is loosely modeled on Anthony Powell’s series "A Dance to the Music of Time." The principal character is Larry Turner, who after showing some promise as a painter settles into a life centered on the appreciation of the arts and watching the strange things that go on around him. Though a passive, introspective person he finds himself constantly entwined in the lives of his friends, Who include: Linda who was Larry’s first love in his college years and continued to fascinate him long after they separated. Chris who was Larry’s good friend and a mentor at Bettner. Chris started out as a gifted potter but in the seventies became increasing involved in dealing drugs. Carol, a young lawyer and Larry’s lover in the early eighties. Travis, who was the wild man of the Bettner years and surprised everyone by becoming its most solid citizen And many others. A summary of the works: A Hero of our Time The first work is, A Hero of our Time (modeled on and offered in homage to Mikael Lermontov’s work of the same name). It is a series of four long short stories tied together in the style of Lermontov’s work. The first story is also called "A Hero of our Time", again in homage to Lermontov’s work and is loosely based on the story "Taman" in the original. It is set in 1974 and in it our central character Larry who had graduated from a small college in Indiana the previous year returns to the area for a weekend to buy some drugs from an old friend and as in "Taman" his innocence has serious consequences for everyone he meets. In the second, "Hawk Mountain" set in 1978, Larry who is now traveling constantly on business for the brokerage firm Winston Stone stops off briefly on his way to a meeting in New York City for a weekend reunion with Linda in the small Pennsylvania college where she is teaching. In the process he learns a lesson about himself and what it means to love someone. Not what he was hoping to find but more valuable. In the third, "Melissa", set in 1979, Larry, in New York City, tries to rekindle a brief affair he once had with Linda’s friend Melissa and learns a few more things about himself and love. In the fourth, "My Most Desired Health", Larry now living with Carol in Chicago loses his job and finds the stress of finding a new job leads him to a new way of seeing himself and his relationship with Carol.
Reunion The second major work is a novel called "Reunion". In it many of the major characters from "Hero of Our Time" come together in the small town of Danbury in rural Indiana for the tenth reunion of their class at Bettner College. Larry deals with the nostalgia he feels for the "hippie" dream of their college years. He tests his love for Carol against the love he still feels for Linda, tests his love for the place and his friends against the way that he has chosen to live his life in the city during the intervening ten years. In the end the outside world intrudes in a surprising way that forces Larry to confront the facts that lie behind his nostalgic image of the place and his past. 1993 In 1993, Carol has left Larry to marry a well-to-do North Shore man and Larry has settled into a comfortable life with books and music in the apartment they shared when Carol suddenly reenters his life with a request that Larry help her resolve a mystery regarding her husband and Larry finds himself playing detective in the familiar world of the wealthy and once wealthy clients of the brokerage firm he works for and discovers what a strange world he really lives in. I imagine this story to be many things, perhaps a kind of strange combination of "Through the Looking Glass"and "The Big Sleep". Retrospective In 1996, Larry, now in his forties and comfortably settled into the routines of travel and work and his love of music and the arts is suddenly forced to face his distance from his own creative side and his love of life, now both dormant, when Chris’s daughter Katie appears. She is proposing to launch herself on a career in the art world by organizing a show of the works of John Norrel, a once famous painter who was with them at Bettner College in the seventies and she wants to include in her show some paintings that Larry created twenty-five years before in the show. The stories: The four stories that make up "Hero of Our Time" are included below The stories may be too long to read on line. I plan to copyright the stories to keep someone else from benefiting financially from my work, but I encourage you to copy them for yourself and pass them on to your friends. If there is sufficient interest I will have them privately printed or try to find a publisher but now I want to see it there is any interest. So, I hope you enjoy them. Click here for the text of the stories. Please! |