MEDIEVAL IN LA

by Jim Paul ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1996

After two rounds of nonfiction (Catapult, 1991; What's Called Love, 1993), Paul offers a novel-cum-essay that makes for a pleasant intellectual browse. Take a plain, unaffected intellectual named Jim, give him a job at a San Francisco art museum, put him on a plane with a female friend named Les for a weekend visit with friends in L.A., then afterward send them home again: and you've got the author's narrative from bottom to top. What happens? Well, nothing. It's just that on the way down, Jim spills tomato juice on his pants--and on the book he's reading, open to a chapter on ""The Triumph of Secularism"" at the close of the Middle Ages. The spill sets Jim to thinking--which he keeps on doing right to visit's end as the plane takes off for San Francisco, leaving the beaches of L.A. behind. The point? Jim has the notion that he's old-fashioned, having a medieval view of life instead of an ""actual"" one--that, for example, he still thinks of the sun as ""rising"" instead of the earth's surface as rotating furiously eastward. Does it matter what--or how--Jim thinks? Maybe not (as he'd be the first to admit), but his doing so makes for a deep dish of brainy historical-cultural entertainment, not only as Jim washes and irons his white pants, goes to dinner and a party with his friends, and to the beach next day, but also as he tells--and ruminates upon--anecdotes and pivotal tales of thinkers from Ockham to Moses, Galileo to Locke, Newton to Hume, Augustine to Johnson--this last droll gentleman, on a long-ago beach of his own, kicking his famous stone in refutation of Berkeley. A weekend book that's penetrating and pleasant at once--a humanities refresher equally at home on coffee table or in any student's scruffiest backpack.

Pub Date: May 1, 1996

ISBN: 0156005379

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Counterpoint

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996

Categories: FICTION