BOOKS

SILKIE: World One, World Two

Silkie: World One, World Two, a novel by David Rothgery, explores the tensions between living the safe life and
reaching for meaning beyond it. The novel centers on
Stephen—a divorced, middle-aged professor, disillusioned, weary of his mundane, circumscribed existence—and his
new student, Silkie—a 23-year-old, homeless schizo-
affective with a split personality.

By the dictates of convention and his profession, Stephen occupies the world of social mores, bureaucratic policies,
and moral precepts. Since childhood, however, he has
been afflicted by an acute awareness of the randomness
of suffering, and, in recent years, has become increasingly troubled by the inadequacy of conventional thinking and perception to account for it. Indeed, Stephen’s quest to
grasp the harsh terms of human existence has shaped
him into a seeker.

Soaking wet from the Oregon rain, Silkie shows up in
Stephen’s college writing class after enrollment has
closed. Sensing a kindred spirit in her elusive but intense presence, Stephen decides to break the rules and,
ignoring college policy, he lets her in.

Over time, reading through her journal full of Escher-like
fractal drawings and puzzling, remarkable descriptions of
distant times and places, Stephen is increasingly drawn
to explore her eccentric, bifurcated vision of the universe.

In fact, Silkie appears to already inhabit an uncertain, treacherous world, which Stephen braces himself
to explore, while she continues to navigate conventionality,
as both a student and a mother. He struggles
to comprehend who she is: a quiet, lonely student
living an unorthodox life, or a mysterious young woman
caught up in a metaphysical journey. Silkie is
an existential love story because a passionate
search for comprehension and meaning, rather than for
romance, drives their complex relationship.

This unusual tale of impassioned seeking, involving a professor and his enigmatic student, leads Stephen, as it
does the reader, to confront the inexplicable nature of
human suffering and to risk a glimpse into the fractured mosaic of life. Ultimately, Stephen jeopardizes his career, relationships, and even his sanity.

Inevitably, by way of a mysterious voice mail, his
relationship with Silkie intensifies. He becomes obsessed
. . . while she disappears. Reeling from Silkie’s
disappearance, Stephen descends into near despair.
Teetering between diverging perceptions of the world, and
reflecting on Silkie’s appearance in his life and the
resulting psychic disruption, Stephen discovers
within himself an urgent need for an alternative truth
outside the boundaries of normal life. One day he walks
out of his classroom, to search for Silkie, and
for meaning itself.

Screenplay available by request

Reviews

“This book is a thoughtful read . . . pegged to a myriad of world events that at first seem random and later begin to play a subtle part in the greater storyline. The author has very skillfully created a novel that weaves a personal dream which draws you in until you, like the Professor, are caught in a very different version of the world around us. . . . Silkie stretches the mind to think in new paradigms.”

Read more reviews »

Little Mozarts, Little Kings

Walking home from school one day in 1952, 8-year-old Colin suffers the first of many unusual epileptic seizures. Mystical in nature and accompanied by visions of people he does not know, these seizures continue to haunt him throughout his life.

Five years later (Colin is now 13), one of the visions—a black girl named Carmen–shows up in his all-white 7th grade classroom. In awe of Carmen (this “mystery girl sitting two seats up and one row over”), Colin struggles to connect with her. She is temporarily up from Mississippi and soon becomes the brightest student in the class. The developing intense relationship between Colin and Carmen serves as the emotional core to the novel. He cannot make her understand that his visions of her must mean something. She cannot make him understand that having to return to Jim Crow Mississippi has a more immediate meaning for her life.

The story shifts to Colin at 20. He has not seen Carmen for seven years, and he’s a high-school dropout, destroyed by the very seizures that have obsessed him. At a Saturday market, he comes across another of his visions: Elsie, an older woman (white) who turns out to be an alcoholic college professor. His growing relationship with her leads to his reconnecting with Carmen in Mississippi during Freedom Summer 1964.

By way of the sudden entrance into his life of an older Nigerian man (Adebayo), Colin discovers the meaning of his seizure visions—a destiny that plays out for Colin, Carmen, and Elsie in the final chapters.

From Little Mozarts, Little Kings

All those hundreds of visions of you, Carmen–you, the “little colored girl” I’d labeled “Doris Day” in my folder–and yet when you showed up in the flesh in my seventh-grade classroom at Our Lady of Mercy that morning in late September, 1957, I didn’t know you.
I should have. Mystical revelations, cosmic recognitions, should come as lightning. Not as a series of shocks—which is how it came.

I think you knew, Elsie. That summer, 1964. Understood much beyond what I did.
Some “visionary” I was.
If I had been a normal, honest-to-God oracle or psychic–and not the species Adebayo said I was–I would have known how the journey was going to end that summer eight years ago. On some back road in Mississippi on a hot Saturday morning. Isn’t that true, Elsie? I would have known. I didn’t. Amirah—with his sporadic, fleeting “visions” of you, of Carmen—wasn’t interested in showing me the “whole.” The whole Vision.

Read more excerpts »