Horace Afoot

by Frederick Reuss

Overview

Fiction

"Quietly entertaining, thought-filled. . . . The narrative voice is particularly congenial—cool and unflappable, often humorous."
—Washington Post Book World

Not since The Moviegoer has a first novel limned the human condition with such originality and subtle insight. A small-town iconoclast who is at once deeply principled and occasionally as absurd as the world he rebels against, Quintus Horatius Flaccus (or Horace) has assumed the name of a Roman poet and has forsworn automobiles, and entertains himself by telephoning strangers to ask them what love is or what they think of St. Bernards. His neighbors in the Midwestern town of Oblivion consider him wacko. This suits Horace just fine, since all he wants in life is "the serenity of not caring."

But people are conspiring to make Horace care about them. There's the dying librarian who finds Horace's morbid curiosity oddly bracing. There's the mysterious woman whom Horace rescues, only to become obsessed with her identity. And as Horace finds himself drawn into their affairs, Horace Afoot depicts the unruly dialogue of his mind and heart with sly wit and splendid generosity of feeling.

"Delights continuously with its humor, originality and . . . unfolding personalities." —Rocky Mountain News

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780375703782
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/29/1998
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Edition description:	1st Vintage Comtemporaries Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Frederick Reuss is the author of Horace Afoot, Henry of Atlantic City, and The Wasties. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and two daughters.

Read an Excerpt

William Tell Oliver came out of the woods into a field the Mormons used to tend but which had grown over in sassafras and cedar, the slim saplings of sassafras thick now as his arm: though not as thick as his arms had once been, he reminded himself: he was old and his flesh had fallen away some. He didn't dwell on that though, reckoned himself lucky to still be around.

Oliver was carrying a flour sack weighted with ginseng across his shoulder. His blue shirt was darkened in the back and plastered to his shoulders with sweat. It had been still in the thick summer woods and no breeze stirred there, but here where the field ran downhill in a stumbling landscape of brush and stone a wind blew out of the west and tilted the saplings and ran through the leaves bright as quicksilver.

He halted in the shade of a cottonwood and unslung the bag and dropped it and looked up, shading his eyes: the sky was a hot cobalt blue, but westward darkened in indelible increments to a lusterless metallic gray, the color he imagined the seas might turn before a storm. A few birds passed beneath him with shrill broken cries as if they divined some threat implicit with the weathers and he thought it might blow up a rain.

Standing so with his upper face in shadow the full weight of the sun fell on his chin and throat, skin so weathered and browned by the sun and aged by the ceaseless traffic of the years it had taken on the texture of some material finally immutable to the changes of the weathers, as if it had been evolving all his life and ultimately became a kind of whang leather impervious to time or elements, corded, seamed and scarred, pulled tight over the cheekbones and blade of nose that gave his face an Indian cast.

He hunkered in a shady spot to rest. He had been smoking his pipe in the woods to keep the gnats away from his eyes and now he took the pipe from his mouth and knocked the fire from it against a stone, taking care that each spark was extinguished for the woods and fields had been dry since spring and he was a man of a thousand small cautions.

Below him Hovington's tin roof baking in the sun, the bright stream passing beneath the road, the road itself a meandering red slash bleeding through a world of green. He sat quietly, getting his breath back, an old man watching with infinite patience, no more of a hurry about him than you would find in a tree of stone. The place was changing. A new structure had been built of concrete blocks and its whitewash gleamed harshly. New-looking light poles followed the road now, electrical wires strung to the end of the house.

Yet some old strain of secondsight from Celtic forebears saw in the lineaments of house and barn, the gradations of hill and slope and road, something more profound, some subtle aberration of each line, some infinitesimal deviation from the norm that separated this place from any other, made it sacred, or cursed: The Mormons had proclaimed it sacred, built their church there. The whitecaps cursed it with their annihilation, with the rows of graves their descendants would just as soon the woods grew over.

All his life he'd heard folks say they saw lights here at night, they called them mineral lights, corpse candles. Eerie balls of phosphorescence rising over money the Mormons had buried. Oliver doubted there was any money buried, or ever had been, but he smiled when he remembered Lyle Hodges. Hodges had owned the place before Hovington bought it for the back taxes, and Oliver guessed that Hodges had dug up every square foot of the place malleable with pick and shovel. It had been his vocation, his trade; he went out with his tools every morning the weather permitted working at it the way a man might work a farm or a job in a factory, studying by night his queer homemade maps and obscure markings, digging like a demented archeologist searching for the regiment and order of elder times while his wife and son tried to coax crops from soil that would ultimately produce only untaxed whiskey. even now Oliver could have found the old man's brush-covered mounds of earth, pockmarked craters like half-finished graves abandoned in hasty flight. Hodges worked on until his death, his dream sustaining him. Oliver reckoned there was nothing much wrong with that, his own dreams had not weathered as well.

Interviews

On Sunday, March 22, barnesandnoble.com welcomed Frederick Reuss, author of HORACE AFOOT.

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Moderator: Welcome to barnesandnoble.com. This evening we are pleased to host Frederick Reuss, the author of HORACE AFOOT. Good evening, Mr. Reuss. Thank you for joining us online this evening. How was your weekend?

Frederick Reuss: Very busy.

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Dale from Williamsburg, VA: Oblivion seems a microcosm of American life, complete with unemployment, crime, and depression. Identity -- and the search for it in our modern age -- and American complacency seem to be the major themes. Could you talk a little bit about the themes in this book and what messages you meant to send?

Frederick Reuss: Oblivion as microcosm -- we're off to a good start. In fact, I did intend to create a kind of microcosmos, and thought it would be interesting to create a character who is attempting to construct an identity from scratch, as it were. Identity is a very nebulous concept -- especially when one begins to obsess about it.

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Steven from Orange County, CA: Fred Reuss, what I loved most about your novel were the many layers of Horace's personality and his personal transformation. Was he a work in progress, so to speak, as you wrote? Did you know where his character was headed? Another general question -- where do you get your unusual ideas from?

Frederick Reuss: My Horace was scraped together from the shards of Quintus Horatius Flaccus and then stirred. As to the writing process -- all I can say is, I make it all up as I go along.

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Sam from Atlanta: Mr. Reuss, who are your literary influences? Who are your favorite authors, and what are you currently reading?

Frederick Reuss: It seems so pompous to claim influences, but let's see Kafka, Beckett, Camus, Dostoyevsky, Mann, Musil, Kleist, Flann O'Brien. I just finished reading Frederick Exley's A FAN'S NOTES and have started a new book by Luc Sante called THE FACTORY OF FACTS. It's a memoir -- very nicely written -- and addresses the theme of identity in an interesting and very up-to-date sort of way.

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Graham from Dayton, OH: Mr. Reuss, are you by any chance a lover of philosophy? Philosophy plays such a big part in the creation of Horace and this book. Who are your favorite philosophers?

Frederick Reuss: I enjoy reading philosophy. I can't say I have a favorite philosopher, just favorite moods that are informed by certain kinds of philosophical discourse. Epicurus influenced the writing of HORACE AFOOT, as did a book on the Cynics I found at the library.

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Eugene from Huntington, West Virginia: Mr. Reuss, could you give us an idea of your approach to writing? One writer once said that the way he wrote short stories was by starting out with one true sentence and then following it with another. Sounds easier than it must be. How do you do it? Do you start with a main story idea and just write? Do you have an outline?

Frederick Reuss: I can't say that I have an approach to writing. I just sit down and follow the dictates of my imagination. I never know from one day to the next what is going to come out. But what does come out gets revised and revised and revised.

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Dennis from Wooster, OH: I am interested in your background, Mr. Reuss. Your bio says that you have lived in many countries and that this is your first novel. What have you done in the past, before you wrote? Will you just concentrate on writing now that HORACE has been a critical success?

Frederick Reuss: My father was a foreign service officer, and I spent most of my childhood outside the U.S. That biographical fact has led some people to compare me with my fictional character, but all I can say is, I ain't Horace....

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Deon from Seattle: Mr. Reuss, often readers like to emotionally identify with a novel's main character (walk inside their shoes for a day, think how they do, become emotionally attached to them). In creating a character as odd as Horace, did you worry that readers would not identify with him and thus stop reading? (For the record, I loved Horace and kept reading.)

Frederick Reuss: The idea that a reader has to identify with a character in a novel is something I find odd. I enjoy thinking along with the author. Guy Davenport (a favorite essayist) defined reading as the suspension of one's mind in the workings of another sensibility. I like that. As to emotional identification -- some of my favorite characters are people whose shoes I would never want to walk in (Raskolnikov), and some aren't even people (Gregor Samsa was a cockroach!).

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Teresa from New York: I notice HORACE AFOOT was published by a small Denver press, MacMurray & Beck. Could you talk about the experience of being published by a small independent press versus a large press? I noticed the bestseller COLD MOUNTAIN was published by a small press also. Do you think small presses will attract more acclaimed books in the future (almost like independent film studios have done this past year)?

Frederick Reuss: I can't say what being published by a big press is like, because this is my first book. A writer needs good editorial support, and that is something which small presses can offer. I also think that small presses are taking chances that larger ones might shy away from. Guy Davenport (who I just mentioned) is a great essayist whose works, as far as I know, have only been published by small presses. There are so many great books out there. The more venues the better, I say....

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Vivian Beatrice from Saugerties, New York: So, Mr. Reuss, would you say your childhood played a major part in the bizarrist tendencies which can be found in your literature? Would you say there is an Oblivion in every small community? When can we look forward to your second novel? Will you be coming to the Northeast for any book signings in the near future?

Frederick Reuss: I like to think there is an Oblivion in every home....

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Linda from Martha's Vineyard: I loved HORACE AFOOT. Are you currently writing a new book or do you plan to? If so, when will it be published and what is it about?

Frederick Reuss: I am working on another novel and hope to have it finished by the summer. I don't dare say any more about it just yet....

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Tom from Clearwater: Often writers put a bit of themselves in the characters they create. HORACE is such an interesting, eclectic man. What was your inspiration for his creation? Is there any truth that he is a reflection of you in any way?

Frederick Reuss: To paraphrase no reflection where none intended.

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Peter from Switzerland: Happy to report that Horace has already found many friends here in Switzerland. Have heard that a German translation is likely, which will add to your fans here. Is another book in the works, and if so, will it be as stimulating as HORACE?

Frederick Reuss: I am looking forward to reading the book in German. I wish I knew the German word for Oblivion -- nicht sein?

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Emily Hoak from Washington, D.C.: HORACE AFOOT is your first novel, and it has been so critically acclaimed (I read your New York Times and Washington Post reviews). Congratulations -- you must be so pleased! How important is it to you that HORACE is well received? Does being positively reviewed put any pressure on you to equally deliver in your next literary endeavor?

Frederick Reuss: I have been very happy with all the reviews. As far as pressure goes, I think of it as an occupational hazard.

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Bobby from Falls Church, Virginia: With the Oscars just days away, I can't help wondering what a film version of HORACE AFOOT would look like. If you had your druthers, who would you cast as Horace? Sylvia? Mohr?

Frederick Reuss: I don't know. But I'd love to see an aerial shot of Oblivion someday.

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Moderator: Thanks for fielding all of our questions this evening, Mr. Reuss. Any final comments for the online audience?

Frederick Reuss: Thank you. It's been fun.

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Editorial Reviews

Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
Ordinarily, the mere mention of philosophy -- Jostein Gaarder's SOPHIE'S WORLD is a notable exception -- is enough to intimidate even the most adventurous reader of fiction. But, though Reuss posits serious questions (What is the nature of identity? What defines who we are, what we think, how we act? Is the self merely a set of precepts and conclusions to be put on or taken off like clothing, or is it established at a deeper, immutable level of consciousness?), he succeeds because he asks them in the guise of one of the more oddly compelling, unrepentantly prickly protagonists in recent fiction.

Reuss's hero is a solitary philosophy junkie who calls himself Quintus Horatius Flaccus (after the Augustan poet) -- Horace, for short. Horace, like John Kennedy Toole's memorable misanthrope, Ignatius J. Reilly, is a man at odds with his time, a man who longs for total detachment but finds himself tugged again and again into worldly affairs by "circumstances, conventions, and a weakness for wanting to be good...."

While fleeing the human entanglements of his mysterious past, Horace glimpses an exit for the small midwestern town of Oblivion and is intrigued by the possibilities implicit in such a name. He soon installs himself in a ramshackle house on a dead-end street whose only concession to the modern age is a telephone. There, through impromptu sessions of randomly reaching out and touching someone, Horace is able to pursue his philosophical ideal of autarkeia -- the serenity of not caring -- while keeping human interaction at a cool remove. "Horace here. I'm calling to ask you what you think love is." For Horace, the bemused responses are no less profound than the pronouncements of the Delphic Oracle, and far easier to interpret.

A sworn enemy of the internal combustion engine and the society it has engendered, Horace daily ranges on foot throughout the town and its surrounding woodlands. One such foray takes him past an ancient Indian burial mound, where he hears a quick succession of gunshots, then witnesses a naked woman stumbling out of the cornfield, bound, gagged, and bleeding. In a moment of doctrinal weakness, Horace comes to her rescue, flagging down a passing car and taking his Jane Doe to the hospital. But he pays a heavy price for abandoning his prime directive: The traumatized woman claims to suffer from total amnesia, and the local police suspect Horace of raping and beating her.

The police investigation turns up little more than the obvious. Horace is an eccentric, a "rich, educated, middle-aged dude" who has only recently changed his name from William Blake. (Before that, he had impersonated yet another English mystic, Chidiock Tichborne.) But without understanding the full import of their discovery, the police have unearthed Horace's greatest secret.

[My] identity is bound to the name I have taken. Quintus Horatius Flaccus. Call it an act of forced continuity that has bound me to the name while leaving the poet to roam freely in the surviving body of his work. I have found justification for my wanton act in countless passages from SELECTED PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS. It doesn't matter to me which views are current and which outmoded. The thought is the significant proposition, right? So I'll take whatever I can get from philosophers and from poets alike. I am QHF for the present. I might just as well be Diogenes, Marcus Aurelius or Jesus Christ. But, thankfully, I lack most of the discipline and all of the ambition.

Increasingly obsessed with the identity of his Jane Doe and the history of the Indian mound, Horace is granted access to the local library's private archives by the head librarian, Mr. Mohr. Terminally ill with cancer, Mohr finds Horace's cool, almost brutal detachment a welcome change from the unctuous concern and outright avoidance he has come to expect from the library regulars. But Horace's compromised philosophical discipline is further weakened by his growing friendship with Mohr, and gradually he awakens to the necessity of changing his name once again. At Mohr's suggestion, he chooses Lucian of Samosata -- "a satirist -- with a Cynic bent -- who lived to expose shams and phonies" and who, like Horace, "thoroughly despised his own epoch." But though Horace/Lucian makes a valiant effort to fix his new identity, it comes too late: Someone, perhaps the real rapist, is shadowing Horace, vandalizing his house and chipping away at the last of his hard-won autarkeia. To complicate matters, when Horace does eventually meet his Jane Doe, she is hardly the victim he had imagined. Instead she turns out to be a small-time drug dealer whose violently unpredictable boyfriend is only too willing to indulge her appetite for self-destruction.

Early in the novel Horace laments the "cheerful optimism" of those who believe there is help for every human predicament, saying, "There is no arithmetic of human emotions -- problem + help = solution." But through the authorial application of a unique emotional calculus, Reuss is able to factor the disparate elements of Mohr's impending death, revelations concerning events at the Indian burial mound, and the drama of Horace's ongoing identity crisis to arrive at a wholly satisfying resolution. To Reuss's credit, Horace Afoot does leave some questions unanswered, perhaps in acknowledgment of the quintessentially unknowable. And that, perhaps, is the ultimate consolation of philosophy.

bn.com editor

Months before a novel or work of nonfiction actually appears in the stores, page proofs are sent out by the publisher to booksellers, critics and talk-show hosts. In theory, these literati will pick up the crisp review copy, glance idly at its first page, then find themselves reading with growing excitement, unable to put the volume aside. Rapt with enthusiasm, the book people will talk up the new title, shops will order vast quantities, and critics will line up to write glowing reviews.

Such, anyway, is the fond dream of publisher and author. Most books, though, are brought out to silence or indifference: The world, as Beckett once said, might just as well be deserted.

I don't know how many readers Frederick Reuss's Horace Afoot will attract, but in page proof this first novel deeply impressed two of Washington's most knowledgeable booksellers, impressed them so much in fact that each urged me to take a look at it. "Your kind of book, Dirda," explained one in early June; "Your kind of book, Dirda," said the other in late July. Bristling slightly -- I had always regarded my tastes as eclectic and hard to pin down -- I nevertheless made a mental note to try Horace Afoot.

Happily, Frederick Reuss's novel does turn out to be one of the kinds of books I like. A mysterious stranger walks into a small Midwestern town called Oblivion, rents a house on a whim, and proceeds to puzzle and unsettle most of the local citizenry. For starts, Horace -- short for Quintus Horatius Flaccus, the Roman poet -- won't buy a car: "I hate internal combustion engines and the civilization that has been built on them." Instead he spends much of his time reading philosophical essays and recalling bits of Latin verse, meandering through the countryside around an old Indian mound, or just sitting on his porch:

"I have been rocking on the front porch for three days now, and I have discovered something: time passes, and I enjoy having it pass. Inactivity is no easy accomplishment, and finding pleasure in it means overcoming conditioned reflexes. My mind wanders. I permit it to. I try to quiet it, slow it down . . . Now I understand why the newer houses in Oblivion have replaced front porches with rear decks. Porches are for being idle. On decks you entertain yourself to death."

In his utter straightforwardness and simplicity, Horace at first recalls Forrest Gump or Candide. But he is, in fact, more a cousin to one of those dispassionate, existentialist intellectuals, such as Roquentin searching for meaning in Sartre's Nausea or the holy murderer of Thomas Berger's Killing Time. Periodically, Horace dials a random number on his telephone, waits for somebody to pick up, and then begins to ask probing questions about the nature of happiness or the difference between illusion and reality. He regards this practice as the modern equivalent of consulting the Delphic oracle.

Out of intellectual conviction, Horace has determined that the proper goal of life ought to be detachment, autarkeia, "the serenity of not-caring." But life, it turns out, has other, more active, plans for this middle-aged innocent. Gradually, Horace comes to like and admire an elderly librarian, who is slowly dying of cancer. Strolling by a cornfield one afternoon, he looks up from his usual daydream to see a naked woman, bound and gagged, stumbling out from between the stalks. After helping her to a hospital, he finds himself suspected of her rape. A foul-mouthed young hoodlum taunts him, a reporter harasses him, a police detective checks into his past and discovers that he used to call himself William Blake.

Without consciously wanting it, Horace is drawn into the life not of oblivion but of Oblivion. He drives a car, acquires a gun. Most of all, he feels sexually attracted to the assault victim, the desperately unhappy Sylvia. As his confusions and uncertainties mount, he decides to change his name again, this time to Lucian of Samosata, "a satirist -- with a Cynic bent -- who lived to expose shams and phonys."

Questions of identity (the existential "Who am I,?" the practical "Who raped Sylvia?"), meditations on the nature of the world, the growing tugs of love and hate and fear all contribute to the appeal of this quietly entertaining, thought-filled novel. The narrative voice is particularly congenial -- cool and unflappable, often humorous without being laugh-out-loud funny, particularly when Horace reacts to and tries to interpret the events around him. Of course, some red-blooded readers may find the book wispy, diffuse, lacking in surprise. But fans of, say, Carol Shields's new novel, Larry's Party, should check out Reuss's similarly revealing look into a man's soul.

At the end of Horace Afoot researchers are starting to excavate the Indian mound, discovering clues "all the way down." Like archaeological digs, people seem to be sites of accreted debris, mounds built on an accumulated past -- even Horace, who has always endeavored to live solely in the present. When we last see this attractive philosophical loner, he is working in the library at the circulation desk.

Washington Post

. . . It belongs in that class you took in college called The American Novel . . . .

Mirabella

The Long Home promises to be one of the most discussed Southern debuts since Brown's Facing the Music . . . .

New York Times Book Review

. . . William Gay might yet prove that Southern literature can accommodate two Faulkners.

Richmond Times-Dispatch

A wealthy, erudite, middle-aged loner in search of anonymity settles in the aptly named midwestern town of Oblivion and is swiftly drawn into the town's persistent local mysteries in this idiosyncratic, rather beguiling debut novel.

The newcomer is, by any standards, peculiar: He repeatedly changes his name, adopting names of writers he particularly admires, among them William Blake and, most memorably, Quintus Horatius Flaccus (the Roman poet Horace). And in a place where everyone drives, he walks. It's while he's doing so, hiking into the country to visit an old Indian mound, that he becomes inextricably tangled in the town's affairs. A young woman, naked and bleeding, stumbles out of a cornfield and collapses. Horace becomes a prime suspect in her assault, until Sylvia, the young woman, regains consciousness and clears him. She refuses to name her attacker, though, and the police (who harbor some nasty secrets of their own) keep a wary eye on Horace. They become even more suspicious when he's drawn into the violent, messy world Sylvia (a self-destructive, small-time drug dealer) inhabits. And then her callow boyfriend, infuriated by her affection for Horace, begins to follow and harass the newcomer. Horace, against his better judgment, finds himself promising to help Sylvia escape from Oblivion. In doing so, he stumbles across some of the town's unpalatable secrets, putting his life itself at risk. Reuss, in a spare, precise prose, does a deft job of catching, without overdoing, the quirks, obsessions, and longings of his characters. And he effectively renders the unsettling (and misleading) calm of Oblivion, a town frantic to deny or suppress life's unpredictability.

Horace,however, is a bit wearing—too skittish, too stubbornly incapable of change—to be very appealing. Still, his voice lingers, as do many of the scenes in this terse, moving exploration of modern anomie and the longing for—and fear of—intimacy.

Kirkus Reviews