Eternity

by David Plante

When Ted Beauchemin is summoned back to America to sort through the belongings of his recently deceased parents, he comes upon a photograph of himself at his first communion and begins a reexamination of his life through the old lens of his abandoned Catholicism. Married to a British woman who grew up in India and who came to know religion only as a curious bystander, Ted returns to London to take up his life again working in the foreign finance sector, but soon realizing that his Boston working class upbringing indoctrinated in him the belief that one lives and suffers in this world in order to dwell in eternity. A sudden disillusionment with his secular life is only exacerbated by the death of a child of whom he is particularly fond and who, before he got sick, was meant to make his first Catholic communion. In the midst of his existential crisis, Ted grows closer to the child’s mother, an American woman married to high-born Scotsman, only to realize that what he believes to have in common with another American is actually a disillusioning fantasy.

As he struggles to find a deeper meaning in his life and particularly his work, Ted often finds comfort in both the vastness and the routine of London, which provides an evocative and atmospheric backdrop to the narrative of his life. But as his work life becomes more trying and his obsession with his lapsed Catholicism continues, Ted begins to find his homelife and happy marriage burdened by the weight of his preoccupations. And while his loving wife makes every attempt to sooth his apprehension, she realizes that he is becoming more and more disconnected and isolated. From the acclaimed National Book Award-nominated writer, comes a novel of spiritual reckoning, a subject that David Plante has deeply explored in his fiction.

Genres: Fiction

208 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2024

About the author

The son of Albina Bisson and Aniclet Plante, he is of both French-Canadian and North American Indian descent.He is a graduate of Boston College and the Université catholique de Louvain. He has been published extensively including in The New Yorker and The Paris Review and various literary magazines. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Among his honours are: Henfield Fellow, University of East Anglia, 1975; British Arts Council Grant, 1977; Guggenheim Fellowship, 1983; American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, 1983. He is an Ambassador for the LGBT Committee of the New York Public Library. His voluminous diary is kept in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. His papers are kept in the library of The University of Tulsa, Oklahoma. He is a retired professor of creative writing at Columbia University. His novels examine the spiritual in a variety of contexts, but notably in the milieu of large, working-class, Catholic families of French Canadian background. His male characters range from openly gay to sexually ambiguous and questioning.
He has been a writer-in-residence at Gorki Institute of Literature (Moscow), the Université du Québec à Montréal, Adelphi University, King's College, the University of Cambridge, Tulsa University, and the University of East Anglia. Plante’s work, for which he has been nominated for the National Book Award, includes Difficult Women (1983), a memoir of his relationships with Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, and Germaine Greer and the widely-praised Francoeur Trilogy--The Family (1978), The Country (1980) and The Woods (1982). His most recent book is a memoir of Nikos Stangos, his partner of forty years, The Pure Lover (2009). The papers of his former partner, Nikos Stangos (1936-2004), are in The Princeton University Library, the Program in Hellenic Studies. Plante lives in London, Lucca Italy, and Athens Greece. He has dual citizenship, American and British.
Considered to be a writer's writer and having lived for so many years among the artistic elite, David's personal memories are seen by many as high cultural history.