About Calvin’s Ghost

Title: Calvin’s Ghost: A Novel
Author: Peter Schwartz
Count: 171,083 words
Genre: Literary Fiction
Sub-Genres: Campus, Social, Historical, Philosophical, Picaresque, Coming-of-Age

Synopsis

Calvin’s Ghost is an American tragedy about grief and brokenness that leads us ever more deeply into the submerged and darkened heart of a native son.

When Eli Wheeler arrives as a newly minted professor on the campus of Tillamook State University in Portland, Oregon in 1991, his mask of self-assurance conceals a fractured past, a pretzeled braid of pain and loss. Son of Tobias Wheeler, the nation’s most acclaimed scholar of the American slave abolition movement, Eli’s subversive vision of American slavery lays bare the deeply personal roots of his struggle with his father.

Amidst the dramatic reverberations of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in April 1992, Eli navigates shifting and uncertain landscapes of race and identity in his classes, the claims upon his conscience of the mysterious engineering student, Shahid al-Haqq, and the devious machinations of Dean James Pritchard.

Eli finds both solace and new forms of enlightenment from his forays to Portland’s Rose City Race Track with Harry Hamish, the irreverent associate dean at T. State who introduces Eli to the mysteries of horseracing, a universe where reality bends, where Eli’s past merges with his present, where his lies crack apart his truths.

Calvin’s Ghost intermingles colorful, picaresque characters and quotidian moments of grace and folly with themes of race and identity, innocence and guilt, and the heavy weave of the past upon our souls. Ultimately, Calvin’s Ghost asks of Eli (and all of us) the same haunting question God poses to Cain, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Calvin’s Ghost: A Novel

Table of Contents

The Spin – 6 – (PDF)

Act One – 8 –

1 / No Man’s Land – 9 – (PDF)
2 / Giant Beast – 13 – (PDF)
3 / Pinocchio Real Boy – 17 – (PDF)
4 / Freedom – 22 – (PDF)
5 / Orlando Patterson – 25 –
6 / Northeast Corridor – 30 –
7 / Brokenness Breaking – 39 –
8 / Gym Rat – 46 –
9 / Ripped Balloon – 55 –
10 / Jasper – 60 –
11 / Good Night My Rabbit – 64 –
12 / Hell Night – 71 –

Act Two – 75 –

Tobias – Letter 1 – 76 –
13 / Injuns – 78 –
14 / False Prophets – 87 –
15 / Name Of The Rose – 105 –
16 / Blade Won’t Sit Down – 119 –
17 / Squeeze That Charmin – 137 –

Tobias – Letter Two – 158 –
18 / Vacant Hearts – 160 –
19 / Carnivorous Plants – 178 –
20 / Pace Makes The Race – 193 –
21 / Stooping – 206 –

Tobias – Letter Three – 223 –
22 / Parsonic Virtues – 224 –
23 / Stigmata – 245 –
24 / Gwendolyn – 259 –
25 / The Original Librarian – 267 –
26 / Othello – 270 –
27 / American Thucydides – 280 –
28 / The System – 304 –
29 / Chekhov’s Gun – 320 –
30 / There Is No Card Catalog – 321 –
31 / The Fast Lane – 329 –

Tobias – Letter Four – 343 –
32 / Dawn Of The Shadow Puppets – 345 –
33 / Jumble – 353 –
34 / Vanport – 375 –
35 / Praying Mantis – 398 –

Tobias – Letter Five – 423 –
36 / End Game – 425 –
37 / Seven Bridges – 442 –
38 / A Dream Of A Wondrous Sort – 459 –
39 / Presence Of The Board – 466 –
40 / The Magnus Effect – 490 –

Act Three – 502 –

41 / Listen To Your Junkman – 503 –
42 / Bulkington – 518 –
43 / Albumen – 541 –
44 / Valedictory – 556 –

Hogback Blues – 579 –