second second

The ensemble of characters in SECOND SECOND includes one who is dead, one who "appears" only in telephone conversations, and one who slips in and out of trance states that place him in the past and future. The protagonist, Don, is a rather ordinary American fellow who suddenly leaves his girlfriend in the South in search of answers to some of the ambiguities in his life. After aimlessly driving around the country for a while, he settles in a town on the California coast. Here he meets a mysterious woman, Marian, whom he believes may have something to tell him; a legless man, Tomas, who's Marian's lover and becomes Don's rival for her affections as well as his best friend; and Hosea, an albino Black blues singer who serves as the catalyst for the revelations that occur to the other characters. Don is also in telephone contact with his girlfriend in the South, Miriam, and with an elderly woman, Emily, whom he believes to be dead.

As the book proceeds, Don's sense of the real and the meaningful is expanded through his experiences with these people and his own mind. Marian moves from being an unwitting user of other people's experiences to the victim of Hosea, who uses the experiences of others--from the future and the past as well as the present--to create his art and his life.

This novel is an exploration of the various levels of "reality" and the potential sources from which we derive information: sensual perception, intuition, and noncognitive insight. This work contemplates, among other things what we believe to be the limits of the rational and real. The book also deals with the concept of barriers--such as inside and outside, life and death, good and evil, the conscious and subconscious minds--in terms of whether these really exist or are artifacts of perception. Lastly, and subtly, the novel explores the difficulty of accepting and integrating life and death in certain cultures, in this case that of modern mainstream America.