Novel Talking

Novel Talking is a memoir of America's bicentennial yearspent in a log cabin in West Virginia by a shipwreckedbachelor PhD who examines the relation of television andmarijuana to reading and writing in search of the Christ-callingthat will preserve him beyond his thirties and givehim a spouse and family. When he was 16 Michael Riley wrote a science fiction storyabout space explorers orbiting a distant planet inhabited bya "young" and "troubled" race of "3rd class humanoids".Standard protocol "to preserve and nurture emerging civilizations"called for the astronauts to replace a child of the alienspecies with "one of ours", who could show them how toavoid self and planetary destruction. In the closing shot thedeparting spaceship hung like a star over a small buildingtoward which rode three men on camels. Novel Talking takes up Riley's unusual spiritual "call" inhis untenured, bachelor thirties, during the Bicentennialyear, when he and his country have "outlived God" andmust come to terms with the American 'sixties, particularlyour modern electro-chemical substitutes for the literary culture that this Thoreauvian castaway was trained to teach.