A Pessimist in Theory and Practice

The title is the joke, and the joke is on everyone. James Hartman has retreated to the woods to escape not just society, but his own disappointment in it. When an old college friend stumbles upon him during a fishing trip, the two men fall into an argument that has been simmering for twenty years: what does a man owe the world, and what does the world owe him? Hartman's pessimism is not merely philosophical. It is a wound he tends. The novel watches two friends, one retreating and one still striving, as they confront the women from their past and discover that running from life and running toward it may look identical from the outside. Bird writes with sharp, astringent wit about the particular 19th-century agony of having ideas in a world that demands action. For readers who love literary character studies and philosophical novels about the costs of idealism.