Who Loves Ya?

...This is the baffl ing contradiction at the heart of the American enterprise, our capacity for hope and our capacity for hatred and fear...

...and fi nally the autumn of 2000, the novel’s moment from which Gabe narrates Mick’s story, when the Supreme Court rules in favor of the Republican presidential candidate...

...BY MARC C. CONNER ‘Could politics ever be an expression of love...

...the early 1990s, when Mick occupies center stage as American intervention in Latin America and the Middle East begins in earnest...

...This particular brand of scholarship has greatly enhanced Callahan’s understanding of the novel as a form, for not only was Ellison one of the great theorists of the form and function of “the American novel,” but his unfi nished manuscript provided Callahan a veritable laboratory of the novelist’s craft...

...But he is best known as the literary executor for the estate of Ralph Ellison...

...He is an endowed professor at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon, where he has taught since the late 1960s, and a major scholar in 20th-century American literature...

...Indeed, Callahan would argue that the very hope that politics includes love, or the possibility of love, is the highest expression of liberalism in American political thought...

...If A Man You Could Love has a political vision, it is this polycultural, many-colored, multivoiced jazz blending of all that makes up America...

...Marc C. Conner is professor of English and director of the program in African-American studies at Washington and Lee University...

...Callahan spins his American yarn across fi ve major sections, like the fi ve acts of a Shakespearean drama, and the reader is left to ponder whether this is a tragedy that laments America’s political failure or a comedy that affi rms America’s political promise...

...tonight is to be for New York...

...Toward the end of Invisible Man Ellison writes that “America is woven of many strands...

...Jackson loses his Senate bid, but this vision animates the novel...

...Gabe, who is also Gabriel the messenger angel, tells the story of Mick, who is also Michael the warrior angel...

...Jackson who, on election night of a bid for the Senate, tells his followers: “To be for L.A...

...Yet Callahan has traveled exactly this path...

...Part of Mick’s appeal is his love for his family, yet the defi ning relationship here is that of male friendship, and such friendships pervade the story...

...Gabe’s marriage suffers as his commitment to Mick’s political future grows...

...The novel explores several different eras in the past four decades of American political life: the late 1960s, with its chaos and hope, as Mick emerges into public life as a staffer for the Eugene McCarthy campaign...

...The blend of ethnicities, races, traditions, and cultures embodied in the friendship among these three men is powerful, and suggests an idea of what we like to believe is possible in American culture, what Ralph Ellison once termed “a search for images of black and white fraternity...

...And to be for New York is to be for every New Yorker as an American, whether African American, Jewish, Hispanic, Irish, Italian, Polish, or,” he paused and licked his lips, “white Anglo Saxon Protestant...

...Callahan is a deeply committed liberal in the McGovern mold, and A Man You Could Love makes no apologies for being fi rmly within that tradition...

...Mick’s marriage seems to thrive, but as his political career takes off, a secret and clandestine relationship lurks as his love is also directed towards another woman...

...Criticism and creation are not sister disciplines...

...But ultimately it is the friendship between Gabe Bontempo and Mick Whelan that defines the novel, and offers its most memorable moments of love, frustration, triumph, and sacrifi ce...

...Callahan and Ellison became intimate friends in the 1970s, and Callahan was probably Ellison’s closest friend when Ellison died in 1994...

...This perspective—the admirer/ outsider who tells the tale of the hero—is our perspective as well...

...asks Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man while delivering the funeral oration for his friend Tod Clifton, gunned down by a New York City police offi cer...

...Callahan is also fi rmly in the vein of the elusive Great American Novel here, for he chooses the perspective not of the charismatic hero but his admirer and friend...

...Callahan produced a version of the novel as Juneteenth in 1999, and has also edited Ellison’s Collected Essays as well as a volume of his short stories...

...Like Ellison’s Invisible Man and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, Callahan’s novel anatomizes both a particular period in political history and the phenomenon of the charismatic leader...

...But when Samuel Johnson defi ned “the novel,” he described it as “a small tale, generally of love,” and we fi nd another kind of novel at work here, alongside the sprawling public, political tale of America’s external life: a novel of human relationships—marriage, passion, parents and children, and especially friendship—that weave throughout and give meaning to political realities...

...John Callahan uses this question as the epigraph to his debut novel, A Man You Could Love, which explores the intersecting themes of politics and love in the grand tradition of the American political novel...

...He took over the editing and publication of Ellison’s unfi nished second novel, a massive project of thousands of pages and innumerable iterations that Ellison worked on from at least the mid-50s to the moment of his death...

...Certainly this novel, like the greatest of American novels— I’m thinking here of Huckleberry Finn or The Great Gatsby, both of which lurk in the margins—has as its main character America itself...

...Fewer still produce their fi rst novel after a successful career in literary scholarship...

...Perhaps most compelling is that between Gabe, Mick, and a charismatic New York congressman, Louis Armstrong (L.A...

...A Man You Could Love follows the friendship of two men, Gabe Bontempo and Mick Whelan, from their initial meeting as political interns in the mid-1960s through the apotheosis of Mick’s brilliant political career in the early 1990s...

...the 1970s to the early ’80s, as Carter’s presidency founders, the Reagan Revolution begins, and Mick’s mature public life as a congressman and then senator commences...

...The writing of a good novel is desperately difficult business, and few people manage it...

...I would recognize them and let it so remain...

...And like its predecessors, A Man You Could Love is highly critical of the American political system and profoundly hopeful about its possibilities and aspirations...

...John Callahan reveals himself to be very much the son of Ralph Ellison, for here he crafts an eloquent American blues that, as Ellison described it, expresses the “near-tragic, near-comic lyricism” of the American condition...