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    Theophilus North: A Novel
    Theophilus North: A Novel
    Theophilus North: A Novel
    Audiobook14 hours

    Theophilus North: A Novel

    Written by Thornton Wilder

    Narrated by Richard Poe

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The last of Thornton Wilder’s works published during his lifetime, Theophilus North is part autobiographical and part the imagined adventures of Wilder’s twin brother who died at birth. This edition features an updated afterword from Wilder’s nephew, Tappan Wilder, with illuminating material about the novelist, story and setting.

    Setting out to see the world in the summer of 1926, Theophilus North gets as far as Newport, Rhode Island, before his car breaks down. To support himself, Theophilus takes jobs in the elegant mansions along Ocean Drive, just as Wilder himself did in the same decade. Soon the young man finds himself playing the roles of tutor, tennis coach, spy, confidant, lover, friend and enemy as he becomes entangled in adventure and intrigue in Newport’s fabulous addresses, as well as in its local boarding houses, restaurants, dives and military barracks.

    Narrated by the elderly North from a distance of fifty years, Theophilus North is a fascinating commentary on youth and education from the vantage point of age, and deftly displays Wilder’s trademark wit juxtaposed with his lively and timeless ruminations on what really matters, at the end of the day, about life, love, and work.

    Copyright (c) 1973 by Thornton Wilder. Copyright (c) renewed 2000 by the Wilder Family L.L.C. Foreword copyright (c) 2003 by Christopher Buckley. Afterword copyright (c) 2003, 2019 by Tappan Wilder

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCaedmon
    Release dateJul 14, 2020
    ISBN9780062972217
    Theophilus North: A Novel
    Author

    Thornton Wilder

    Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) was an accomplished novelist and playwright whose works, exploring the connection between the commonplace and cosmic dimensions of human experience, continue to be read and produced around the world. His Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of seven novels, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, as did two of his four full-length dramas, Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1943). Wilder's The Matchmaker was adapted as the musical Hello, Dolly! He also enjoyed enormous success with many other forms of the written and spoken word, among them teaching, acting, the opera, and films. (His screenplay for Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt [1943] remains a classic psycho-thriller to this day.) Wilder's many honors include the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the National Book Committee's Medal for Literature.

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    Reviews for Theophilus North

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    • 4/5
      Wilder's fictionalized autobiographical novel about what might have been if things had been all glossy and bright. Nevertheless a fun tale with insight into some great characters.
    • 4/5
      Thornton Wilder was a true man of letters who led a life that any author would be envious of. How fitting is it that he cranked out Theophilus North at the age of 76, just a couple years before dying, as a parting gift to the literary world. This is a backward glance at the 1920’s which reads as if it were written by a young man living in the time period. It’s also a wonderful tribute to his twin brother whose death shortly after being born haunted him throughout his life; the book is in part a fantasy of the life Theophilus would have led, part autobiographical, and part things Thornton himself wishes he could have done while living in Newport, Rhode Island. His main character spends time tutoring, giving tennis lessons, and hobnobbing among the rich, who all seem to have problems he can help with in his quiet way. The book brings back this bygone time, but it’s not sentimental in the slightest, and is a better read than most of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s works about the wealthy, even though it was written fifty years later. Wilder was certainly more grounded because of his upbringing, and not ‘one of them’. As with all of his books, it is intelligent and restrained, but deceptively subversive. The rich are parodied, and there are several instances of recreational sex; while those are without graphic detail, I almost fell off my chair in the chapter called ‘Alice’ when a married woman meets Theophilus in a bar and later asks him to “give her a baby”, since her husband cannot.There is dignity, wit, culture, and grace here, all while acknowledging man’s shortcomings, his weaknesses and occasional madness. It’s moral without being prudish. It has common sense and humanity, all while asking the question, as he put it in a letter to a friend, “What does a man do with his despair, his rage, his frustration?” Quotes:On doctors:“Many great surgeons have to set up a kind of wall between themselves and the patients. To shield their hearts. See if you can change that. Put your face near to the patients when you talk to them. Pat them lightly on the elbow or the shoulder and smile. You’re going down into the valley of death together, see what I mean?”On the military:“I returned his gaze with that impassive expression I had learned to adopt in the Army where irrationality knows no bounds and where we underlings have no choice but to make a pretense of unfathomable stupidity.”And this one; I love how the chivalry of early air combat is followed in a simple way by the hell of war:“Air combat was new; its rules and practice were improvised daily. The acquisition of technical accomplishment above the earth filled them with a particular kind of pride and elation. There were no gray-haired officers above them. They were pioneers and frontiersman. Their relations with their fellow-fliers and even with their enemies partook of a high camaraderie. Unrebuked, they invented a code of chivalry with the German airmen. None would have stooped to attack a disabled enemy plane trying to return to its home base. Both sides recognized enemies with whom they had had encounters earlier, signaled to them in laughing challenge.The lived ‘Homerically’; that was what the Iliad was largely about – young, brilliant, threatened lives. (Goethe said, ‘The Iliad teaches us that it is our task here on earth to enact hell daily.’) Many survivors were broken by it and their later lives were a misery to themselves and to others. (‘We didn’t have the good fortune to die,’ as one of them said to me.) Others continued to live long and stoic lives. In some cases, if one looked closely, it was evident that a ‘spring had broken down’ in them, a source of courage and gaiety had been depleted, had been spent.”On flirting; I loved moments like these spread throughout the book:“Then under the tablecloth she pinched me in what I suppose is called the thigh.”“I admired her enormously and wished I were many miles away. I was rattled; I floundered; I talked too much and too little.”“So there we sat, face to face, over that table, looking into each other’s eyes. I can go out of my mind about a pair of fine eyes. Mrs. Willis’s were unusual in several ways. Firstly there was a slight ‘cast’ – so mistakenly called a ‘flaw’ – in her right eye; in the second place you couldn’t tell what color they were; thirdly, they were deep and calm and amused. When I go swimming in a pair of eyes I am not fully master of what I may say.”
    • 4/5
      Episodic novel, great writing, but some storylines are on the slight side. Wilder has little on New England that Marquand didn't say better.