Press Release: Purple Onion Press March 2007
Local Author Navigates the Hazards of Higher Education and the Perils of Employment - With Insight and Laugh-out Loud Humor.
By Lynn Sessa
Editor, Purple Onion Press
Fiction
"The Book of Job(s)"
By Roland Verfaillie
Purple Onion Press, 328 pages, $14.00
Are you looking for the ultimate career guide? Stuart author, Roland Verfaillie, has written the quintessential guide to the search for career to which most of us devote a lifetime. However, should you solely rely upon the advice of the book's protagonist, psychologist, Dr. Jack Mc Kane; you could easily find yourself, fired from your job, divorced and seriously neurotic. Dr. Jack Mc Kane bears an uncanny resemblance to the author - who will swear there is no relationship between him and the fictional character. Having met the author over several editing sessions, I believe that the author shares his denial system with the likeable and fortunately lucky Dr. Jack Mc Kane. How coincidental that both the author and his protagonist have strikingly similar employment resumes, and both are psychotherapists. Roland Verfaillie's droll humor and deft character portrayal bring a refreshing new style to the writing scene. Not since Kurt Vonnegut, has an author given birth to tragicomic characters that the reader can love, hate and strongly relate. "The Book of Job(s)" is not derivative of Vonnegut's works. I discern more of a synthesis, evolving out the styles of Kurt Vonnegut and Dave Barry. Roland Verfaillie has a gift for telling the narrative tale in the far out imaginative style of Vonnegut. However, Roland has the knack for writing in the regional and cultural dialects for his colorful array of characters that appear throughout the novel. His irreverent humor, like Dave Barry's, communicates wit and wisdom with no shame in being socially incorrect, callous and often insensitive to his wives and fellow man.
There is more theme then subject matter in "The Book of Job(s)." The author's age speaks for his generation of "boomers," whose coming of age brings on reflection if not nostalgia. The author has no fixation on the past. Rather each job and each relationship is an opportunity to mature - or not. Life is more of a rational choice than is job selection to Dr. Jack Mc Kane. Mc Kane as a young man had aspirations to be a rocket scientist. However, the launch of a model rocket that nearly decapitated his father and begrudging assistant ended his dream. Throughout life Jack Mc Kane changed jobs like a man with good hygiene changes socks and underwear. Jack sums up his thesis in his statement,
"I have...had to work so many menial jobs to pay my way through school, that I can honestly say that I've sampled a great variety of occupations. My resume of jobs
having absolutely no future makes me more credible [as a job advisor] because I know what not to do for a living from actual experience." Dr. Jack Mc Kane never lands the ideal job. And he never tells us what to seek from a job futures perspective. He leaves it to the reader to decide, or not decide, what's good for him. There are lots of tips and questionable sagely advice on how to pick a career. The heart of the novel may lack virtue, but it makes up for it with hedonism.
"The Book of Job(s)," like its biblical counterpart is, after all, about suffering as a condition of being human...in this case suffering the meaningless jobs to which most of us resign ourselves in order to earn a living. But that's where the similarity to that gloomy Mosaic tale ends.
The author's protagonist endures a series of misfortunes in search of higher education, success and career; proving there's absolutely no correlation among these idea pursuits. Unlike the biblical character Job, Jack Mc Kane refuses to suffer the indignities of ordinary work. He'd rather drop out than pay homage to the work gods. Jack is determined to make work a blast, or put up with it for as long as it takes him to finance his next vacation. This must read novel is for the servant of the work force and the rebel at heart.