Book Review: Nate’s New Age

Michael Hanson’s novel (upper left)
on display at Flyleaf Books
in Chapel Hill, North Carolina

A Wild Ride

Reviewed by Moristotle

Like the life of the central character of Michael Hanson’s novel Nate’s New Age, reading it can be a bit of a bumpy ride, especially if you make the mistake I did at the start: trying to read it only a few pages at a sitting. After a couple of weeks of sporadic sittings, of having to thumb back to be reminded who Brenda was, or Max, or Shuly, or Margaret, or Rebecca, or Kimberly, or his therapist Lynn… I finally realized I needed to buckle down and read continually. That worked much better, and I recommend that other readers approach it the same way.
    The reason, I think, is that, like the six sections of the El Camino de Santiago story line excerpted here yesterday, the sections of the other story lines of the novel do not appear consecutively in the book. The sections of each story line are interspersed with those of others, in staccato fashion [with each note sharply detached or separated from the others].
    In fact, Michael himself probably had to do a bit of thumbing to locate the El Camino sections for yesterday’s posting. He confessed in a note to me that the book’s “structure is difficult from the writer’s standpoint – you can imagine my trying to keep the timeline straight when I’m not putting it on paper that way.”

So, why did Michael do it that way? He says that it “helps embody the chaos of Nate’s life. I wrote the novel to move along at a fast clip, not keep the reader in one space for long (like Nate himself). It’s how many of us experience reality. When I’m sitting here at my desk in the library, I can be living the past, the present, and an unknowable-but-imagined future all in an instant.”
    Not that my own life hasn’t been bumpy too, and it seems even bumpier as I look back on it, or even try to imagine the rest of it....
    Nate is far from reaching my age in Michael’s book, but the trajectory of his life is well indicated, and I think that other readers will find the same pleasure I did in gauging that trajectory from their readings. Nate will continue to try to come to terms with his alcoholic parents, especially his father; to try to understand and incorporate several of the characters’ “new age” advice; to learn how to negotiate the opportunities for wild sex that are offered by the likes of Kimberly (talk about some wild rides!); to try again perhaps at married life….

I personally marveled most (after the sex scenes) at the novel’s many depictions of “new age” characters, their beliefs and practices. These characters are able to perceive Nate’s “inner glow,” which seems to account for the attraction that other characters feel for Nate, whose widespread attraction would otherwise puzzle me.
    The term “New Age” (a proper noun) generally refers to “a range of spiritual or religious beliefs and practices that rapidly grew in the Western world during the 1970s” [—Wikipedia]. I don’t think there should be any doubt that that is where the “New Age” of the novel’s title comes from. And even though I became fairly familiar with New Age beliefs and practices myself, I couldn’t have begun to write the relevant passages of Nate’s New Age. (Or the sex scenes either.)

    Nate’s New Age calls on us to read it at least twice, and my own reading persuaded me that it well deserves another. So, all together now: let’s pick it up and read!

Copyright © 2021 by Moristotle