A chronicle of a relationship, life on the road, what it means to be alive.
A dying writer named Ecclesiastes (or Ecc) and his girlfriend Molly (or Moll), who doesn’t know he’s dying, take a road trip to end all road trips across the United States, and along the way they discover things about themselves and each other. Along the way, they meet old friends, pool-playing Native Americans who are disappointed to learn the etymology of “India Pale Ale,” a Voodoo priestess, an affluent and coked-up New Englander, and many others.
Alexander’s THE PRESENT IMMORTALITY is proof that just because a book doesn’t have a plot, doesn’t mean nothing happens in it. It’s a highly character-driven piece, but the characters are so strong, they carry the story all the way along by themselves. Alternately insightful and intolerably pretentious, Ecc presents a bit of an emotional handful for poor Moll, who has mostly just had to learn to live with his gnomic pronouncements of poetry and pseudo-poetry. But Moll is in many ways the breakout character, far more simple and down-to-earth, her agenda sometimes aligning with, and sometimes at odds with Ecc’s; and yet the love these two characters feel for one another is just about as real as anything on a page can be.
The passages of the book alternate between Ecc’s and Moll’s points of view, always in first-person. The narrators are both colorful and beautifully verbose. Moll’s narration is, naturally, less flowery than Ecc’s, but still beautiful in its own minimalist way, and the two complement each other as they tell the story in parallel. The prose that flows from these characters is as radiant and vivid as a drive through the American landscape can be.
If this book has one flaw, it’s the structure of these narrative shifts. Overall, Ecc narrates what probably constitutes the majority of this book. And while it’s certainly quite fun to spend time in his head, it would have been refreshing to have heard a little more of Moll’s calling out a little more of his BS. Ecc and Moll sound like a handful for the reader, but they end up being some of the best traveling companions one could ask for in this story of two very different people who both don’t quite fit in with mainstream society, and both love each other.
THE PRESENT IMMORTALITY is a fun and beautifully written road-trip story with lots of strange characters and the kind of literary wonder that lingers long after the book is done.
~IndieReader.