From the Publisher
Praise for the award-winning work of Daniel Quinn:My Ishmael
"Enthralling, shocking, hope-filled, and utterly fearless, Quinn leads us deeper and deeper into the human heart, history and spirit. Thank God the Gorilla is Back!"
--Susan Chernak McElroy, Author of Animals as Teachers & Healers
Ishmael
"From now on I will divide the books I have read into two categories--the ones I read before Ishmael and those read after."
--Jim Britell, Whole Earth Review
"A thoughtful, fearlessly low-key novel about the role of our species on the planet...laid out for us with an originality and a clarity that few would deny."
--The New York Times Book Review
"As suspenseful, inventive, and socially urgent as any fiction or nonfiction book you are likely to read this or any other year."
--The Austin Chronicle
The Story Of B
"A compelling 'humantale' that will unglue, stun, shock, and rearrange everything you've learned and assume about Western civilization and our future."
--Paul Hawken, author of The Ecology of Commerce
"One of the most important storytellers of our age, Daniel Quinn, in The Story of B, continues the journey begun so beautifully with Ishmael."
--Peter M. Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline
From the Inside Flap
's Ishmael was the winner of the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship, a prize honoring fiction that offers creative and positive solutions to global problems. This extraordinary novel has become an underground bestseller and a testament for a burgeoning spiritual movement. Mr. Quinn's new novel is a companion piece--not a story that follows the first but rather a story contemporaneous with the first. In it, the Ishmael saga takes a startling direction that is in no way prefigured in the original.
The gorilla licked his lips--nervously, it seemed to me. "I think we can safely say that I'm not prepared to deal with the needs of a person your age. I think that can be safely said. Yes."
"You mean you give up. Is that what you're telling me? You want me to go away because you give up. Don't you think a twelve-year-old girl can have an earnest desire to sav
About the Author
Daniel Quinn is the author of Ishmael, Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest, and The Story of B and co-author
(with Tom Whalen) of A Newcomer's Guide to the Afterlife.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
There was a second chair in place when I arrived on Friday, and I didn't like it one bit--not the chair itself, of course, but rather the very idea of sharing my Ishmael with anyone, selfish minx that I am. But at least it was not as nice as the friendly old broken-down one I was used to. I pretended it wasn't there, and we got started.
"Among her friends in college," Ishmael began, "my benefactor, Rachel Sokolow, counted a young man named Jeffrey, whose father was an affluent surgeon. Jeffrey became an important person in many lives at this time and later, because he presented people with a problem. He couldn't figure out what to do with himself. He was physically attractive, intelligent, personable, and talented at almost anything he turned his hand to. He could play the guitar well, though he had no interest in a musical career. He could take a good photograph, produce a good sketch, play the lead in a school play, and write an entertaining story or a provocative essay, but he didn't want to be a photographer, an artist, an actor, or a writer. He did well in all his classes but didn't want to be a teacher or a scholar and wasn't interested in following his father's footsteps or in pursuing a career in law, the sciences, mathematics, business, or politics. He was drawn to things of the spirit and was an occasional churchgoer but didn't care to become a theologian or a clergyman. In spite of all this, he seemed "well-adjusted,' as it's called. He wasn't notably phobic or depressive or neurotic. He wasn't doubtful or confused about his sexual orientation. He figured he'd settle down and marry one day, but not until he'd found some purpose in life.
"Jeffrey's friends never tired of finding new ideas to present to him in hopes of awakening his interest. Wouldn't he enjoy reviewing films for the local newspaper? Had he ever thought of taking up scrimshaw or jewelry making? Cabinetry was put forward as a soul-satisfying occupation. How about fossil hunting? Gourmet cooking? Maybe he should get into Scouting. Or wouldn't it be fun to go on an archaeological dig? Jeffrey's father was completely sympathetic with his inability to discover an enthusiasm and ready to support him in whatever exploration he might find worthwhile. If a world tour had any appeal, a travel agent would be put to work on it. If he wanted to try the life of an outdoorsman, equipment would be supplied, gladly. If he wanted to take to the sea, a boat would be made ready. If he wanted to try his hand at pottery, he'd have a kiln waiting for him. Even if he just wanted to be a social butterfly, that would be fine. He shrugged it all off, politely, embarrassed to be putting everyone to so much trouble.
"I don't want to give you the impression he was lazy or spoiled. He was always at the top of his class, always held a part-time job, lived in ordinary student housing, didn't own a car. He just looked at the world that was on offer to him and couldn't see a single thing in it worth having. His friends kept saying to him, "Look, you can't go on this way. You've got too much going for you. You've just got to get some ambition, got to find something you want to do with your life!'
"Jeffrey graduated with honors but without a direction. After hanging around his father's house for the summer, he went to visit some college friends who had just gotten married. He took along his knapsack, his guitar, his journal. After a few weeks he set out to visit some other friends, hitchhiking. He was in no hurry. He stopped along the way, helped some people who were building a barn, earned enough money to keep going, and eventually reached his next destination. Soon it was getting on for winter and he headed home. He and his father had long conversations, played gin rummy, played pool, played tennis, watched football, drank beer, read books, went to movies.
"When spring came, Jeffrey bought a secondhand car and set out to visit friends in the other direction. People took him in wherever he went. They liked him and felt sorry for him, he was so rootless, so ineffectual, so unfocused. But they didn't give up on him. One person wanted to buy him a video camera so he could make a film of his wanderings. Jeffrey wasn't interested. Another person volunteered to send his poetry around to magazines to see if anyone would publish it. Jeffrey said that was fine, but personally, he didn't care one way or the other. After working at a boys' camp for the summer, he was asked to stay on as a permanent member of the staff, but it didn't appeal to him that much.
"When winter came, his father talked him into seeing a psychotherapist he knew and trusted. Jeffrey stuck with it throughout the winter, going three times a week, but in the end the therapist had to admit that, apart from being "a little immature,' there was nothing whatever wrong with him. Asked what "a little immature' meant, the therapist said Jeffrey was unmotivated, unfocused, and lacked goals--everything they already knew. "He'll find something in a year or two,' the therapist predicted. "And it'll probably be something very obvious. I'm sure it's staring him in the face right now, and he just doesn't see it.' When spring came, Jeffrey went back out on the road, and if something was staring him in the face, he went on being unable to see it.
"The years drifted by in this way. Jeffrey watched old friends get married, raise children, build careers, build businesses, win a little fame here, a little fortune there . . . while he went on playing his guitar, writing a poem now and then, and filling one journal after another. Just last spring he celebrated his thirty-first birthday with friends at a vacation cottage on a lake in Wisconsin. In the morning he walked down to the water, wrote a few lines in his journal, then waded into the lake and drowned himself."
"Sad," I said after a moment, unable to think of anything more brilliant.
"It's a commonplace story, Julie, except for one fact--the fact that Jeffrey's father made it possible for him to drift, actually supported him while he did nothing for nearly ten years--put no pressure on him to shape up and become a responsible adult. That's what made Jeffrey different from millions of other young people in your culture who in fact have no more motivation than he did. Or do you think I'm mistaken in this?"
"I don't understand you well enough to say whether you're mistaken."
"Thinking of the young people you know, do you find them burning to be out there becoming lawyers and bankers and engineers and cooks and hairstylists and insurance agents and bus drivers?"
"Some of them, yeah. Not especially to be the things you mentioned, hairstylists and bus drivers, but some things. I know kids who wouldn't mind being movie stars and professional athletes, for example."
"And what are their chances of becoming these things, realistically speaking?"
"Millions to one, I suppose."
"Do you think there are eighteen-year-olds out there dreaming of becoming cabdrivers or dental technicians or asphalt spreaders?"
"No."
"Do you think there are a lot of eighteen-year-olds out there who are like Jeffrey, who are not really attracted to anything in the Taker world of work? Who would be glad to skip it entirely if someone gave them an annual stipend of twenty or thirty thousand dollars?"
"God yes, if you put it like that, I'm sure there are. Are you kidding? Millions of them."
"But if there isn't anything they really want to do in the Taker world of work, why do they enter it at all? Why do they take jobs that are clearly not meaningful to them or to anyone else?"
"They take them because they have to. Their parents throw them out of the house. They either get jobs or starve."
"That's right. But of course in every graduating class there are a few who would just as soon starve. People used to call them tramps or bums or hobos. Nowadays they often characterize themselves as "homeless,' suggesting that they live on the street because they're forced to, not because they prefer to. They're runaways, beachcombers, ad hoc hookers and hustlers, muggers, bag ladies, and Dumpster divers. They scrounge a living one way or another. The food may be under lock and key, but they've found all the cracks in the strongroom wall. They roll drunks and collect aluminum cans. They panhandle, haunt restaurant garbage cans, and practice petty thievery. It isn't an easy life, but they'd rather live this way than get a meaningless job and live like the mass of urban poor. This is actually a very large subculture, Julie."
"Yeah, I recognize it now that you put it this way. I actually know kids who talk about wanting to go live on the street. They talk about going to specific cities where there are already a lot of kids doing it. I think Seattle is one."
"This phenomenon shades off into the phenomena of juvenile gangs and cults. When these street urchins are organized around charis...
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