The Hollow Middle

Book excerpt: The Hollow Middle follows Albert Lesiak, an aging English teacher in Connecticut, who receives a windfall in delayed acknowledgment of the government¿s complicity in his father¿s cancer death and decides that it is time to live a different life on land he owns in Maine.When his wife Mary suggests that they could foster or adopt autistic twin boys she fell in love with on a website and could use the stipend money in furtherance of Albert¿s vision, Albert gradually perceives himself as possibly adapting to the role of patriarch. A meditation on the curiosity of making sense and the dilemma of becoming true, The Hollow Middle ambles, mostly, and goes still for periods of various duration, acting like it¿s not beholden after all to the rhetorical.