The City of Your Final Destination

You work long and hard, with single-minded determination, to achieve a goal.  Then, just as it's within your grasp, you realize you're no longer interested.  With luck, something more attractive has taken its place. 

A not uncommon experience of youth -- dispiriting, but educational as well.

Such is the moral, if there a moral, to Peter Cameron's 2002 novel, The City of Your Final Destination: A Novel.

Omar Razaghi, an Iranian immigrant, is an English doctoral student at the University of Kansas.  His thesis on the work -- a single novel, The Gondola -- by the (fictitious) Uruguayan writer Jules Gund has won an award and a fellowship enabling him to expand the thesis into a biography to be published by the University of Kansas Press.

The award is conditioned on the biography's having been authorized by the deceased writer's estate. 

The estate, it turns out, has three executors -- Adam Gund, the author's brother; Caroline Gund, the author's wife; and the younger Arden Langdon, the author's long-time mistress.  They politely respond in a joint letter, refusing to grant the requested authorization.

Omar is 28, a bookish sort, vague and passive, and a bit of a naïf.  He had assured the grant committee that he already had the authorization, because he saw no reason that it would be denied.  He now is depressed and miserable.    He shows signs of giving up, but his girl friend Deirdre is made of sterner stuff.  Go to Uruguay, she insists.  Persuade them in person. Your entire future depends on it!

In something of a daze, Omar flies to Montevideo, discovers that "Ochos Rios," where the executors live, is merely a house located in the middle of nowhere, and somehow muddles his way from the capital to their doorstep.  His arrival is quite a surprise.

Arden and Caroline both live in the Gund family home, avoiding each other as far as possible.  Caroline lives in a tower, among the mediocre paintings that she has now given up painting.  Arden, younger and more assertive, more or less runs the house.  Adam, elderly and gay, witty and literate, and given the funniest lines by Mr. Cameron, lives in a Millhouse within lengthy walking distance with his young friend Peter.

Don't worry overly much about the plot.  This is something of a novel of manners, not an exciting race to a denouement.  No villains.  Everyone is a bit confused and confusing, and years of life isolated in the Uruguayan back country has lent the characters a certain nineteenth century charm and sense of leisure.  Omar arrives from the 21st century, hoping to talk charmingly, make friends rapidly, get signatures on the dotted line, and fly back to Lawrence, Kansas.

Instead, he finds himself sucked into the leisurely life of his hosts, where every act and every comment has decades of back story.  Jules Gund had written a letter expressing his desire that his biography never be written.  Or had he?  Jules had committed suicide?  Or had he?  Peter is happy, both with living with a much older man and with life in the sticks.  Or is he?  Arden is a no-nonsense sort who has no interest in further romance.  Or is she?

Omar flounders,  All three executors must agree to the authorization, and positions keep changing.  But the land is beautiful, the food is simple but good, the conversation is genteel but intelligent.  And, in a moment of weakness, Arden kisses him.

Omar's nearly fatal reaction to a bee sting brings Deirdre flying down to Ochos Rios.  She is eager to take charge and make decisions.  Omar is no longer so sure he wants to entrust his life to her ambitions.  Nevertheless, all three executors, for greatly varying reasons, finally consent at the same time to sign the authorization.  Omar and Deidre fly back to snowy Kansas.

Spoiler Alert!  Omar and Arden marry happily and have kids, living their lives in Ochos Rios.  Omar drops out of the doctoral program and never writes the Gund biography.  Caroline ends up, to her own surprise, living in New York.  Deirdre becomes a professor at Bucknell, and does just fine, thank you.  

In 2007, I wrote a review for Cameron's later novel Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You, a very funny and moving first person narrative about a brilliant 18-year-old New York City boy with a serious personality disorder.  I decided this past week to see what else Cameron had written.  The stories couldn't be more different.  But both display Cameron's beautiful sense for language, his sense for the humor that persists in the midst of difficulty, and his sympathy for -- and ability to understand -- people who are a bit different.
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The book was adapted as a movie, to mixed reviews, in 2009.