By Dan Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Peter Gould has lived in Vermont for over 45 years and his new novel Marly is about Vermonters, climate issues and wind turbines, among other things.
Growing up Jewish, Gould — who calls himself a “non-observant Goddess-worshipping American Jew — said it was his parents who were “intellectual, into fashion, good with puns and one liners” who helped steer him in the direction that his life as a writer and performer has taken.
“I thank my stammer for making me a writer and mime,” he told San Diego Jewish World in a recent email.
Marly is told in one voice only, a male narrator, middle-aged, speaking to a woman — off-camera, so to speak, since we never once hear her replies to the narrator’s side of the conversation that continues for the entire book. But the book is written in such a way that the reader will most likely “hear” the woman’s replies because of the way Gould has structured the one-sided dialogue.
Gould told said he is grateful to his publisher in Vermont, Dede Cummings, and her Green Writers Press for publishing Marly.
“Cummings cares about writers, the environment, and supporting the local community in Vermont,” he said.
A jack of all artistic trades, Gould is an author, a stage performer, a teacher, and a theater director. He went to Brandeis University in the 1960s.
”An unnamed man narrates the story,”Gould told this reporter in an email that he composed while sitting on a bus in Mexico going up the west coast of that country. “The guy is having a much- too-early-mid-life crisis when he meets Marly, a deep-thinking, independent, polysexual ecologist.”
The book is about Vermont, the environment and important climate issues, but it is told it humor, Gould said, adding: “I care deeply about the Earth’s future.”
He said he used a comic form to frame his ”story” in Marly for one simple reason: “Funny works. If you can make people to laugh, you’ll get them to listen.”
Gould began writing the book in 2011, with encouragement from his wife, Vermont state representative Mollie Burke.
There’s an interesting twist to the backstory of Gould’s novel, too. While the male tells the story in Marly, “it is ultimately Marly’s story,” Gould said. Marly is the person in charge, and while the reader only sees Marly through the eyes of the narrator and never once hears her dialogue, Marly is the actually protagonist of the book.
Think aboutthis side-note to Gould’s book: the author used to be stutterer and struggled to find his voice and as an adult assumed he’d never write dialogue because he had no ear for it. But what an “ear” for monologue he has!
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Bloom, based in Taiwan, is an inveterate web surfer and email correspondent. He can be reached via dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com