Hi Everyone!
I am happy to be here today to bring you a guest post from Alan Kessler. Please held me in giving him a warm welcome.
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Why I wrote Gables Court, an
unusual love story.
Stereotyping, the handmaiden of
prejudice, can be intellectually and emotionally destructive, both to the
holder of negative, preconceived ideas and the recipient hurt by an insensitive
remark, It is easy to stereotype. We don't have to alter our world view or
change how we feel. We define the world along known values and certain groups
are excluded. They are lesser. They are The Others. The fact we all have skin,
bones, and blood is biologically evident, but for those who see the world only
from their vantage point, and this is usually a place of advantage, we
are not all equal. Money, power, education, separate us, liberals and
conservatives each in their own tribe. The stereotype is forever looping and
echoing in our mind and whether intentional or not, sends its poison into
others--the disabled, the overweight; a weak child, a minority, the foreign,
the odd.
The above is a heavy introduction as
to why I wrote Gables Court. But central to the story is what I, a male
author, perceive as a gender stereotype: the young male as sexual hunter,
interested in copulation and if love follows it's an unintended consequence.
Samuel Baas, the protagonist of the novel, isn't religious. His
motivation for wanting love and marriage before intercourse isn't a value
rooted in faith or family values. God for him is an abstraction. His father is
valueless, a murderer; his mother loves cocktails and parties at her country club.
No, Baas' quest comes from only one place. His heart.
I wanted to write about innocence,
about a young man who, perhaps like many young women (my own stereotype, I
know, ironic, I admit it) searches for romance--romance with a small r, and in
his journey finds heartache, joy, disappointment, mystery, and, in the end,
hope.
All humans have likes and
dislikes. Recognizing this universality could free us to explore our
preconceptions. If we acknowledge prejudice as a common trait we might be more
open to examining our own. This, in turn, might lead to greater empathy, to
reaching out to the marginalized and different, to believing there are men like
Samuel Baas.
There is a generality I can accept.
We have a universal need to connect to others and hope when doing this we not
only find love but possess the courage, wisdom, and strength to accept it.
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Thanks for the post!!
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More about the book:
Gables Court isn’t Romance, erotica, or faith-based fiction but it is about the
resilience of the human spirit in our quest to find love. Although the language
is adult, the scenes of intimacy aren’t graphic. I appreciate how Pearl S. Buck
handled sexual matters in The Good Earth with the simple sentence: she taught
him.
Age 24, Samuel Baas is a romantic and virgin who wants love
and marriage before sex. After moving from staid New England to the hothouse
world of Miami, he falls in love with Kate, the college girl he wants to marry.
She isn’t interested in becoming anyone’s little wife. For her, sex is
recreational.
A lawyer, Baas represents an accused Nazi war criminal and
Haitians who, if deported, face retribution from the murderous Tonton Macoute.
Head of a crime family, his father takes a special interest in his son’s legal
career. In this complicated world, Baas
dates and tries to answer the central question in his life,
“Is love for someone else?”
Loneliness isn’t gender specific nor is alienation just a
phase.
Over a span of ten years, Samuel Baas journeys toward
intimacy—and his people
Gables Court isn’t intended to moralize about what is right
or wrong. Without borders or mass, a mixture of joy, heartache, confusion, and
mystery, love follows its own rules.
Happy Reading!
