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a novel by Larry Wenzel by encountering his deepest aspirations. Reviewed by I'm no literary critic, but Wenzel seems to have a writing gift: his sentence structure, his way with adjectives and sense of timing hold the reader's interest. The characters come alive, and the overall plot hangs together and is neatly resolved -thanks to recurrent traits in the main characters. At times I found the story gripping. Wenzel clearly is wrestling with philosophical issues that engage him. Jack Joplin's phenomenological method is utterly clever, and the author's allusion to Jean Paul Sartre, Gabriel Marcel and Kierkegaard are all appropriate. He might have been alluding to Sartre's novel, Nausea, or his well known theme "existence precedes essence" in Existentialism, or the explicit self-creation in The Transcendence of the Ego. Sartre is not read nowadays as he was in my time. The idea of friendship plays a large
role in this novel about personal self discovery. This is also
a topic of philosophical interest today, starting with a return
to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and over to today's
C.S. Lewis' The Four Loves -one of which is friendship. I have encouraged Wenzel to keep on writing. My one concern with this novel was that some of the religious extremism struck me as unrealistic. Dec. 6, 2005
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