At four in the morning, when even the last revellers on Broadway have gone home, an old man on a third-floor balcony hears someone singing. A woman sits alone on a bench by the fountain with a bicycle beside her and a wide hat on her head, singing something slow under the noise of the water, then mumbling to someone who is not there. A patrol car slows, then moves on. When she rides off south through a red light, she seems to dissolve. Theo of Golden by Allen Levi keeps coming back to that kind of figure: the person the town has learned to see without really looking at.
A Grammar Lesson at the Fountain
The woman is Ellen, and when Theo later invites her to collect a drawing of herself, she turns up half an hour early in a borrowed wheat-coloured dress, red high heels and a velvet hat that has slumped into shapelessness. Before he can sit down, she points out that his letter has a subject and verb that do not agree. Then she asks whether Jesus could have eaten pork, and whether the stranger is documented, and what he makes of Eudora Welty.
The novel is very good at this sort of person. Ellen lives with a mental illness that can tip her into a frightened monologue without warning, and Levi writes those spells without condescension. He also lets her be clever, literate and extremely funny. Her bicycle is named after a line from William Saroyan, and one Sunday she drags it into the sanctuary of the town’s grandest church, hurling biblical insults at an usher until a white-haired matriarch takes her by the hand. The scene is played for comedy, then quietly turned into the best sermon the congregation has heard in years. In Theo of Golden by Allen Levi, the gift of the drawing matters less than what it unlocks: the story Ellen tells under his umbrella in the rain about a hospital in Charleston thirty years ago, the worst day of her life and also the happiest.
Basil Cannonfield, the busker outside the coffee shop, gets a similar hearing. He gave up teaching to nurse his dying sister, and he still writes songs he never plays for tips because nobody pays for music they do not already know. Simone Lavoie, a graduate cellist who came across the country to study with one celebrated teacher, is teased daily by the bookseller for lugging an instrument the size of a hockey player when a guitar would earn more. His slow climb toward a master’s recital gives the second half its warmest set piece, an evening when half the Promenade fills two rows of a concert hall. The novel’s patience with these lives is its great virtue. Theo almost never fixes anyone. He sits beside them until they say aloud what they have stopped telling anyone.
The River Behind Theo of Golden
Theo himself is harder to see, and that is deliberate. He refuses to give a surname, pays with a card in a company’s name and turns every personal question back on whoever asked it. What Levi does reveal comes in memories, and the loveliest is from boyhood beside the Douro in northern Portugal, where a fisherman in rubber boots is painting the sunset from an easel on the bank. He finishes the last bare patch of canvas with river mud on his finger, guides the boy’s thumb across it, and sends him home carrying the picture. Decades later that canvas hangs behind Theo’s desk in New York.
The rest of the backstory arrives slowly, through the books and paintings in a studio, a scarred oak on the Promenade that older Black residents call the Eye of God, and an artist’s mother who once studied in Madrid. Attentive readers will guess some of where this is going well before the final chapters, and Theo of Golden by Allen Levi does not much mind. Its suspense is less about who Theo is than about whether he will say it before the year runs out.
The Trouble With Saints
Theo keeps telling people that everyone is capable of saintliness, and the novel takes him at his word, which is where it strains. Nearly every person he meets is improved by the end, often in exactly the way the first conversation predicted. The plot leans on coincidence to bring people together: strangers turn out to be related to each other, and a chance witness happens to be in the right place in the middle of the night. When violence does come in the final chapters, after hundreds of pages of soft light and coffee, it arrives as a shock, and the people responsible are never seen clearly. The faith that runs through the book is, for most of its length, a matter of practice rather than argument, with a doubting bookseller treated affectionately. By the closing memorial service it is preached outright, at length, and readers who do not share it may feel the novel has stopped talking to them. Those who come for warmth will be content. Those who like their goodness tested may find Theo of Golden by Allen Levi too sure of itself.
The darker material in Theo of Golden by Allen Levi includes bereavement, wartime trauma, homelessness, addiction, a violent assault and a mother’s separation from her child, handled with care and without graphic detail, and there is no sex on the page.
The Long Way Round for Allen Levi
Levi was born in Bay Minette, Alabama, and practised law for some thirteen years before leaving to study fiction at the University of Edinburgh and to work as a singer-songwriter. His only previous books were a children’s story and The Last Sweet Mile, a memoir published by Rabbit Room in 2014. He brought out this novel himself in his late sixties and and sold it largely by hand with the help of his niece, Aron Ritchie.
Word of mouth did the rest. Its success led him to a literary agent at WME, a deal with Simon & Schuster and, eventually, a long run at the top of the bestseller lists. Theo of Golden by Allen Levi has the shape of a fable about that kind of patience, and it is hard not to read some of the author into the old man on the bench.
After the Last Page
Theo of Golden by Allen Levi ends on a list of what became of everyone in town, from the busker to the bookseller, and it is too neat by half. But the scenes that stay with a reader are not the resolutions. They are an old man asking a busker to sing a song nobody tips for, or holding an umbrella over a stranger while she remembers holding her newborn for the only time. Readers who loved the reluctant neighbours of Anxious People, or the painting that ties strangers together in My Friends, will find a gentler cousin here, and Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River offers a similar mix of Midwestern miracle and plain grief. The novel’s real claim is modest and hard to argue with. Most people have never been looked at as carefully as Asher draws them or as kindly as Theo describes them, and being seen that way can change what they believe about themselves.