Searching for Robert P: Episode 1

by Marjorie DeLuca

Welcome to Episode 1 of the serialized novel, Searching for Robert P!
Ethan Welsh is a handsome, successful grad student with a well ordered existence and a host of lucrative job prospects in the tech industry. But he’s lonely and looking for a human connection, which doesn’t come easy in his digitized world.
His well-ordered life suddenly changes when he witnesses a middle-aged hippyish woman digging up the ground by the walls of his college. The appearance of a security guard causes the woman to flee, leaving her journal - the memoirs of 19 year old Ruby Dell, a student at the college in 1972.
Ethan rescues the journal and becomes fascinated by the young girl who wants to be independent, liberated, educated and happy but her obsession with long-haired, Robert Plant lookalikes keeps getting in the way. Drawn helplessly into her story, Ethan follows Ruby’s journey, from her arrival in a dull South-East London backwater miles away from trendy Chelsea or Carnaby Street – to her meeting with Pam and Patsy, two fellow Psychology students as well as Viv, the glamorous seductress who makes a career of sleeping with the profs. The three friends soon embark on the crazy, hedonistic rollercoaster of 70’s student life. Parties, pot, protest and promiscuity come first while academic education takes a back seat.
Ruby blunders from one doomed relationship to another searching for “the one”. When she does finally meet him, he drifts in and out of her life spoiling her chances of success at any subsequent relationship .
Ethan comes to identify with Ruby as she wrestles with life’s big questions, but he can’t help contrasting the lonely sterility of his modern life with the free spirited enthusiasm of hers. Along the way, Ruby’s story helps him understand his own relationships, and soon she becomes so real to him, he sets out to find her and the elusive dream man who influenced her life, as well as solve the mystery of what is buried by the college walls.
Searching for Robert P compares two generations. The generation who emerged fresh from the 60’s and its heady promises of peace and love into the changing landscape of the turbulent 70’s, and the tech savvy youth of the 21st century, a generation freed, yet alienated by the dominance of technology and social media.

70 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 14, 2014

About the author

Marjorie DeLuca spent her childhood in the ancient cathedral city of Durham in North-Eastern England. She attended the University of London, became a teacher, and then immigrated to Canada. There she also studied writing under her mentor, Pulitzer Prize winning author, Carol Shields. She writes in many genres, including historical, suspense and YA sci-fi. She also writes for screen and TV..
Also writes as M.M. DeLuca.

Reviews

[Margitte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Episode 1 of the novel Searching for Robert P. introduces the reader to Ethan Walsh, a young highly successful techno-man, and Ruby Dell, an older woman, which he observed trying to dig a hole and bury her diaries in her old college grounds. Chased off by a security guard, she leaves in her hurry, leaving the envelope with her precious words behind.

Ruby reached a cross roads in her life and it came suddenly.
I drove to work on auto pilot. Every day I just pointed my wagon in the right direction and it would take me to the school where I’d spent the last twelve years trying to teach literature to sixteen and seventeen year olds. There was always the occasional keener who’d devour two or three books a week, but the rest were like the kids that lined the front steps of the school. The ones who said fuck you in answer to every question and called their enemies bleeding skanky chavs and fucking motherfuckers.

I decided to quit teaching and walk out of my classroom for good after sixteen minutes of my first class, and just three weeks into the autumn term. I was doing the usual stale standup shtick to the hostile audience and suddenly, without warning, the window to outside took on a blue and shiny glow, like a single movie frame - beckoning me with an extended middle finger that said follow me, idiot or be eternally screwed.

Fidgeting bodies, gaping yawns and pen poking displays merged into one muddy, blurred mass. My once lucid words become nothing more than a monotonous blah–blah-blah – a kind of verbal fog – in which everyone, including myself, was lost.

But when Martin Abernathy, the resident class comedian, interrupted my presentation on symbolism and metaphor to announce to the class, “Definition of miasma. Odour achieved when you lay the world’s worst fart.”

I switched off the overhead projector, collected my brief case and headed towards the door. On the way out I picked up a balled up Kleenex, popped it into the garbage, told Adam not to call Jesse a fag (because he’d discovered him carving a large, ejaculating penis on his desk), then nodded a shy goodbye to the class.

Someone, somewhere worries about washing their underwear, I thought as the door to the outside opened onto the rest of my life. The whole world lay before me - raw and untouched by my particular footprints.

Ethan is lonely and starts reading the older Ruby's diary which she wrote in 1972 as a young student in South-East London. It was an era in which 'parties, pot, protest, and promiscuity' were the order of the day. He relives her gradual, but inevitable erosion of her innocence in the swinging seventies by getting lost in her secret words.

Ethan's modern life as a highly educated metro man is sterile and lonely, while Ruby's life were filled with passion and free-spirited energy in her hay day. Her search for a Robert Plant lookalike, turned her young life into an aimless rollercoaster ride as she jumped from one relationship crash to another, growing slowly old in the process. Ethan observes a middle-aged hippyish woman running from the college grounds. Her entire image spoke of everything he missed out on in his life. He needed to know what life was all about outside his own self-imposed peripheries, but also in an era he never experienced in his high-tech modern era.


He placed the brown envelope on the table. The prospect of an afternoon spent quietly reading Ruby’s journal filled him with a feeling of breathless apprehension, and each second of postponement – to hang up his jacket or mix a banana protein drink – only served to heighten his excitement. Sentimental similes popped into his head to describe the experience of reading it - like looking in at the warm glow of a lighted window from the cold of a winter night, or like opening a door in time to a kinder, gentler age, or like peeping through the keyhole at what the butler saw.

A short, interesting, sometimes pukingly informative read, but so typical of the author's amazing ability to switch between genres in her different books. However, the detail is as usual so accurate and well-research, the story becomes a treat to read! The impression is that only a person who have been there could recall such in-depth detail to use in the story, and this makes the book so much more believable.

The prose is descriptive, beautiful, rhythmic, flowing.

I haven't read a serialized novel before, and since this is Episode 1, the rest of the tale looks promising. Sharp wit is combined with intricate detail in painting the two different lives colliding in the story.