THE GREAT REFUSAL

A poetic manifesto of resistance against things as they are.

Growing up gay in an impoverished evangelical Christian household, Gerald (There Will Be No Miracles Here, 2018) worked his way to Yale, went to Wall Street, earned a Harvard MBA, founded a nonprofit—and then disappeared. One inspiration was a pamphlet that instructed how to do just that; it “strongly recommended that you leave town ASAP. So, I left town.” His title borrows from Dante, who condemned the decision of the hermit Peter, drafted into the papacy as Pope Celestine in 1294, to renounce the role and return to his solitude after just five months. His successor imprisoned him, which Peter allowed was solitude of a kind. Gerald’s lesson? “You can let go.” Letting go involves, among many things, rejecting a culture of premature death in which, as he memorably portrays it, we’re entombed and mummified in unwanted worlds of work, school, consumerism, and where the American people are “out for revenge, out for themselves, just like the president.” The author is nicely provocative throughout, countering the civil rights phrase “I am somebody” with the story of Odysseus and the Cyclops, the former telling the latter that his name was Nobody before driving a sharpened pole into the monster’s one eye. “What if we chose to be Nobodies for a while?” Gerald asks. He elaborates on the Homeric theme later, saying that he sees the story of resistance as an epic, a fitting genre for “when a society is caught between the old ways that have reached their end and the new ways, the new world, that is yet to arrive.” When it does arrive, Gerald suggests, it will be borne by love to transcend “what this dead-end world has presented to us.” It’s a lovely vision, and, if Gerald’s ruminations are sometimes diffuse, they are always smart and sharply observed.

A great refusal indeed, and inspiration for a lurking army of Bartlebys.