Love and betrayal coast-to-coast. A gay man who betrays his lover, a painter who gives up his art to serve the poor, a prostitute who hitch-hikes across the country to start a new life and a gallery owner in Seattle who comes to New York in search of her father and finds love.
Imprudent Zeal is a tightly woven epic novel covering the lifetimes of a group of very different people who impact one another in unexpected ways in different parts of the country. They are: an alcoholic Korean War veteran in New York who gives up drinking and runs a homeless shelter, the young prostitute who hitch-hikes cross country while carrying his baby, her daughter who grows up in Seattle and becomes an influential art dealer, and a gay artist and his bisexual lover who first get together in a small college down south and then reconnect as competitors many years in Seattle.
Excerpt
Scully’s New York Times was still on the floor from Sunday when the delivery guy dropped off the Monday paper. Peculiar, thought the building superintendent when he noticed the two papers. Twenty years I been here I ain’t never known Scully to spend a night away. Ain’t never known him to leave his paper out like this.
By Tuesday morning the Sunday paper was beginning to yellow and look brittle. By Wednesday the stack of papers had taken on the look of weathered kindling. That was when the superintendent decided to use his passkey and see if anything was amiss in Scully’s apartment. He opened the door and called out, “Anybody home?”
The only sound he heard was the humming of a refrigerator. Watery light washed through the single window that overlooked Bank Street. It was light enough for him to see a worn easy chair near the window. On a table next to the chair he saw an empty coffee cup and a stuffed ashtray. Glancing into the kitchenette, he spied an empty table and clean dishes stacked in the drain. Walking into the bedroom, he noticed that the bed was made and a Bible was fanned open face down on the bedside table. It looked as if Scully had just gone out for the day. Manny the super couldn’t find any evidence to back up his feeling that something was terribly wrong, but he couldn’t get rid of the feeling either. He decided to call the police.
The precinct sent Benny Bardelli around. Benny had been working the neighborhood for years and knew all the building supers. He greeted Manny in his usual way: “Hiya doin’, Manny? What’s up?”
“It’s Scully. He seems to be missing. He ain’t been home four five days. That ain’t like him. Scully never goes nowhere. And that other guy, too, that homeless guy he took in. He ain’t been around neither.”
“You talking about that guy looks like Lurch on ‘The Addams Family’?”
“Yeah. That’s the one. I call him Frankendude.”
“Did Scully have any enemies you know of?”
“Scully? Naw. The man was a living saint. He run that outfit down by the meat markets where they took in homeless people and run a soup line and all. Everybody loved him. Used to be he couldn’t walk half a block without five six people reaching out to shake his hand. But he shut down his operation about a year ago, and since then he’s been pretty much a loner. Don’t seem to ever talk to nobody no more, ‘cept that crazy he took in. He lost a lot of weight, too. Damndest thing. Musta been one of them starvation diets. Musta lost fifty pounds in practically no time. And he didn’t look good at all if you ask me.”
“Does he have any relatives you know of? Maybe somebody out of town he might be visiting?”
“He has a daughter. At least I think she’s his daughter. Mac ... something or other. Sounds kinda like a man’s name. Lives out in Seattle. She come here once maybe three four years ago, but she ain’t been back since.”
“So maybe he went out to Seattle to visit her.”
“He’d a told me.”
Benny asked a few more questions and said he would file a missing persons report. “That’s about all I can do,” he said. “I imagine he just decided to take hisself a vacation. He’ll probably show up any day now.”
Three thousand miles away in their new condo on Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill, Lane Felts and McKenzie McDonald were getting ready to eat one of Lane’s infamous egg dishes. “I just had a thought, Lane said. “We should give Scully a call. We haven’t talked to him in ages.”
“Good idea. Maybe right after dinner.”
But right after dinner they got a call from their friend Jamee, and they forgot all about calling Scully.
Professional Reviews
An original, rambling look at America
From the idealistic would-be priest who gets tossed out of the seminary for "imprudent zeal" to the "wrong side of the tracks" musician and artist from Mississippi to the hooker's daughter in Seattle still looking for her daddy, Imprudent Zeal is filled with wide-ranging characters and the colorful specifics of their lives.
The rambling storyline felt comfortable and kept me smiling and watching expectantly to see where these peoples' lives would finally intertwine.
Alec has a nice feel for place and time. I could feel the suffocating heat in Mississippi and the bone chilling rain of a lonely man at a train station on Long Island New York. I also loved learning more about the art of painting.
If I had any criticism, it's that I wish he'd slow down the pace a bit and really plunge us farther into each individual person's heart. I felt sometimes that the narrative became a little too much of, "They went here. They went there. They went to another place" and occasionally I got the feeling I was still in the introduction, waiting for the story to begin.
Eventually, though, his compassion for these wayward souls comes through and the book slowly and finally drew me in to the point that it surprisingly became a page turner. I was racing to get to the end to find out how it would all turn out.
The central part of the story takes place in New York at a kind of "do it yourself" community center called "Everything For Everybody" run by the exiled would-be priest. Those scenes throb with reality and color, and the mix of characters felt bone real since it's based upon a real place. Worth the price of admission alone.
by Steve Schlachlin
Alec has constructed a lovely book filled with warm, well-meaning people all trying to find a place in a world that makes little sense to them. I do recommend it.
a tour de force of autobiographical fiction
by Lou Hamburg, The Olympian
Alec Clayton is an artist, writer, husband and father. He is also a refugee from chain bookstore management and “little” magazines. This book is the great circus train wreck that was America from the 1950s to the 1990s. It moves not only in time, but also in space, from the Deep South to New York City and Seattle. This landscape is populated by artists, art gallery owners, possible saints and a prostitute redeemed by the love of a good man. Now there’s a bit of gender role reversal. Characters are straight, gay and bisexual. Sex, drugs and the last taboo, creativity loom large in the tale. If this book had a soundtrack, it would be rock and roll played on a calliope.
In the 1960s, artist Lane Felts flees the South to New York City after being jilted by his lover Palmer Jackson. He falls under the spell of Scully McDonald, a failed seminarian who runs Everything for Everybody, a grassroots organization that houses the homeless and feeds the hungry. Scully launches prostitute Becca McDonald in a direction that leads to redemption. McKenzie, Becca’s daughter, becomes a successful gallery owner in Seattle. While searching for her father Scully, she represents both Palmer and Lane. More coincidences than a Dickens novel, but smoother and more believable.
The characters are complex emotionally and have depth. I enjoyed Alec Clayton’s second novel as much as the first (“Until the Dawn”) and look forward to his third. A tour de force of autobiographical fiction.
As deafness, illness, and demonic forces close in around him, Ludwig van Beethoven must summon his faith and genius to complete the Missa Solemnis—a sacred masterpiece he believes could bring divine light into a darkening world.
A teenage boy struggling with the coming-of-age issues of sexuality, religion, and peer approval is overwhelmed, but soldiers on. After several years, he comes to understand the family forces that have left him so deeply troubled, and the process of
