The Peripatetic Philosopher asks for help:

 SEARCHING FOR A BOOK COVER

DEVLIN, a novel

JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, JR.

© DECEMBER 23, 2016

REFERENCE:

What follows explains my interest in finding a suitable cover for this new novel.

NOTE TO A REGULAR SUPPORTER

George,

You may not have the time for this, so this is just a thought. I have been racking my brain for a book cover for DEVLIN, a novel.

I want the cover to be simple but emphatic.

There are images of the era of F. Scott Fitzgerald that depict the pseudo-sophistication, cuttingly handsome characters of his time that indicate the "Roaring Twenties" of the last century. These are usually in profile. I see if I can find one.

Devlin is cuttingly handsome in an androgynous sense, which will become signatory in the 21st century, when the demarcation between male and female becomes so ambiguous that it has ramifications far beyond sex role identity.

Not to confuse you, and certainly not to make the cover too complicated, Devlin is intimidating in a masculine sense, a former star athlete but using his feminine or intuitive brain as opposed to his masculine or cognitive brain as do the majority of his colleagues.

I am working systematically, patiently and thoroughly with this novel. When I have completed it, which will be soon, I am going to Kinko copy it as a manuscript document. Betty will read and criticize it much as Vera did for Nabokov and then I'll post it on KINDLE. I fully expect it to be picked up by a major publication because I think it is that good.

It is the story of an Irish American born in the Great Depression of a poor family who by the dint of focus, attention and determination is able to assume a role in the rise of the United States to a hegemony and imperial force in a world devastated by WWII.

Devlin has a solid scientific education but with the temperament and inclination of an artist. He has been trained to manage right, but scoffs at that suggestion, and instead leads by doing the right things.

His superiors and colleagues find him lucky when it is a simple case of preparation meeting opportunity as the United States in post-WWII is breaking out of its isolationist philosophy to perform on the world stage, having no choice as no one else is capable.

Physically, he is "Hitler's dream" of racial superiority -- Nordic, blond, blue-eyed, tall, strong and pure -- but there the resemblance ends. He is empathetic, sensitive and egalitarian, which even he doesn't appreciate until he leaves the comfort zone of the United States and its cultural biases to facilitate the formation of a new chemical company in South Africa.

It is 1968 with him soon to be thirty. While the world has been devastated with war and left in ruins, only a generation after WWII, the United States -- for actually the first time -- has to assume the role of hegemony as the empires of monarchies across the world including Great Britain, Russia, Japan, Austria and Hungary have vanished and America is now the lone super power economically as well as politically and militarily.

Polychem is a small specialty chemical company established by a chemist and salesman shortly before the Great Depression of 1929. WWII has thrust it into an international role in support of the war, a role it would never have anticipated.

Devlin, by the accident of his birth and preparation, comes of age just as his country is in the process of finding a role in the world.

Nothing could be more incongruous than he and his boss as corporate leaders of enterprise. Both trained as bench chemists, they have become movers and shakers in the wider world. Together, they make a complete executive force with his boss the velvet glove and Devlin the iron fist.

Devlin, if I can be so bold as to point out is "Trump like"(this book was first written decades ago), in being results oriented, tough, fair, consistent and uncompromisingly direct and in your face if you don't perform doing what you have said you will do.

He is intuitive rather than cognitive preferring to move symbols or concepts rather than to perform mechanized processes.

He was not a good bench chemist and had been planning to pursue a post graduate education in theoretical chemistry when his third child was on its way when he was 23. Not making enough money in the laboratory as a bench chemist, he answers a Chemical & Engineering News ad for a job as a chemical sales engineer, never having sold before, and again, quite by accident finds he excels at that function.

Incredulously, and this follows him everywhere, he is a loner with little interest in people collectively, or in things in general, while being almost obsessively driven by ideas. When ideas don’t compute, such as theology (Catholicism) or economics (capitalism), he is in conflict. Despite this albatross, he out performs everyone in Polychem in sales and rises to corporate executive status in his twenties against a world going through the agony of rebirth into a new age.

A devout Irish Roman Catholic, everything changed when he is exposed to South Africa's apartheid, corporate duplicity and his Roman Catholic Church's indifference to that practice.

He has an affair with a beautiful Afrikaner woman, his secretary, who teaches him about life and love and a reality he never knew existed. She is a mix of Afrikaner, Indonesian and Chinese and from the upper class of Afrikaner society while he comes from the lower class of American society.

The relationship between these two is very Dostoyevskian reflecting the isolationist cultures of the United States and the Afrikaans nation, both of whom are out-of-step with international reality and the world at large.

Devlin, by the accident of his birth, steps into this world at the precise moment the 20th century (1968) ends a little early as the world is suffering a nervous breakdown as it is unprepared for the disruptive changes brought on by the war or exploding technology, including the introduction of the atomic bomb. He is on the cusp of this new age and a new world in all his innocence.

The novel shows by inference how unprepared the United States is for the challenges of the world stage, as it lacks the sophistication, the history, the culture and the gravitas to assume such a role. Stumbling as the US does into this role, and again quite by accident, much that follows has the imprint of its naiveté with Devlin personifying that impediment.

The book begins with Devlin confessing his story to a priest in confession in Chicago, and ends refusing absolution from that same priest at the end.

I'm posting this on my blog, too, in case anyone else has any ideas for a cover.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, and thank you always for all your help.

Jim