In May of this year, best-selling author John Green delivered the commencement address at Kenyon College, his alma mater. Known for his young adult novel The Fault in Our Stars, he began his speech by remembering one of his favorite teachers. “Professor Rogan was a brilliant teacher, but I’ve forgotten much of what I learned in his classes about phenomenology and gospel redaction,” Green said. “What I remember most is that he loved me and that he took me seriously. He and his wife Sally welcomed me into their home, fed me, laughed with me, cried with me.” I had been thinking about mentorship when I discovered Green’s speech, and specifically, whether a set of universal, core characteristics grounds this type of relationship that, at its best self, transforms its parties with experiences that seem to transcend the ennui and malaise of our current culture.
One of my more recent observances of this relationship occurred to me when re-watching the 2000 film Keeping the Faith. I imagine that today’s audiences would not receive this movie well—in our post-September 11 world, art that is free of cynicism, irony, and suspicion is an enigma, but this earnestness is why these films continue to allure me. I’m especially drawn to those produced in the decade immediately preceding the World Trade Center attacks. In the movie a young rabbi (played by Ben Stiller) ruffles kippahs with emotive and exciting sermons, and his asking a Harlem gospel choir to sing “Ein Keloheinu.” But while other rabbis disapprove of the young rabbi’s ministry style, the senior rabbi (played by the late Eli Wallach) lends his young charge careful and sincere attention, albeit accompanied by a mischievous smile. I think of Lucy Honeychurch’s line in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View: “I rather mistrust young men who slip into life gracefully.”
A few weeks before I revisited the film, Deena Goldstone’s debut novel, Surprise Me, slipped into my own life. It, too, unfolds primarily in the time of Nirvana, Bill Clinton, and Birkenstocks before their recent resurgence. College student Isabelle Rothman decides to enroll in writer Daniel Jablonski’s tutorial during her last year as an undergraduate. Daniel, “starting his fourth year as some sort of ill-defined visiting professor at the same college” has four novels behind him—“two books of wondrous reviews and respectable sales and then two books that fell off the face of the earth.”
Isabelle enters the frustrated writer’s life at one his lowest points—after two ended marriages, during an intense bout with agoraphobia, shortly before an absent child reappears and complicates his life, and in the middle of a writer’s block that serves as both a cause and a symptom of these woes. I’ve seen enough movies to know how this situation likely unfolds. Goldstone propels my guess with the last line of her short prologue: “Opposites attract.”
And yet, I keep reading. Because Surprise Me progresses more like a film than a text. She does this thing, quite often, where she drops a conspicuous hint—only a line or two—for what might happen next, and then she waits for a few pages before revisiting and explaining. One example occurs after Isabelle’s father, Eli, gives her advice on post-college life:
And all Eli can say is, “Be careful.”
And of course that’s the last thing Isabelle wants to be, because it is the one thing she always is.
And then she meets Casey.
When the blistering summer finally cools and the first sharp edge of autumn marks the early mornings, Isabelle faces the fact that she’s still in New York, still without a plan of action, still fending off Nate’s campaign to have her move to Washington, and that she has to do something about it all.
“Who is Casey?” I write in the margin. I find out he plays soccer on Sundays in a park two pages later, and he and Isabelle become intimate two pages after that. One page after that, I finally find out the answer to why Casey is not a harbinger of Isabelle’s carefulness. This narrative structure repeats through the book, but like a movie that flashes an inexplicable scene on the screen only to wait to unfold it half an hour later, this type of storytelling compels me to trust the creator and what she chooses to reveal.
Goldstone unveils the development of a mentorship. Like Green’s professor at Kenyon and Eli Wallach’s senior rabbi, Daniel never fails to take Isabelle, with all of her naiveté and neuroses, seriously. “[H]e has no idea what a writing mentor does,” Goldstone writes of Daniel early in the novel. “He thinks the whole idea of teaching someone to write is a fool’s errand. Writing is mysterious and mercurial and maddening, and he certainly has no idea how to help someone do it better.” Many of the best writers and teachers don’t, but they do know the power of earnest attention and encouragement because once upon time, someone read their words and told them to keep going. “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” French mystic Simone Weil writes in her essay collection Gravity and Grace. “It presupposes faith and love.”
But neither Daniel nor Isabelle recognize their generosity. While Daniel reads one of Isabelle’s new drafts in his office, “he of course hears Isabelle’s voice reading the words and sees her writing around his campus office with some kind of newly acquired confidence. Did he give her that? He asks, “Maybe. But how?” Isabelle similarly grasps that her mentor has done something to her, but she can’t name it: “Something extraordinary happened, she knows it. Somehow Daniel guided her toward a vision of herself that is singular, unique, divorced from everyone else’s expectations—a writer.” In other words, Daniel’s taking her seriously as a writer causes Isabelle to take herself seriously as a writer.
All of the above occurs in 1994, or “Part One” of Goldstone’s novel. “Part Two,” which unfolds between 1994 and 2000, and “Part Three,” which takes place during the summer of 2014, continue the narrative arc. One way to view the later years is Daniel’s sustained mentorship of Isabelle, but instead of writing, he helps in her vocation of being alive. The same can be written of Daniel—other people, including Isabelle’s, mentori Daniel on how to be more human. Love, family, hurting, and healing feature prominently in these later parts and focus more on Daniel than Isabelle.
Goldstone’s novel doesn’t end as I thought it might from the beginnings of “Part One.” But even if it had, the story would not have disappointed me. The surprises of Surprise Me occur with enough frequency to make up for its predictable parts, and in a society where intergenerational and mentoring relationships remain rare, the book serves as a needed reminder that “biology flows downhill,” as George Vaillant writes in his book Aging Well. In other words, members of older generations become more fulfilled, happier, and live longer when they serve the young. And the young, like Isabelle, receive from the more experienced among us invaluable knowledge, support, and attention.
“I want to think about something besides life and death,” Isabelle says in the final pages. One of the surprises revealed to her, however, is that there is nothing else.
