The age-old Rousseau-Hobbes debate solved, merely requiring a grisly murder (or two)
“The human heart is unknowable” is the theme of Fatal Friendship.
The novel begins when Frank Bradley learns that his best friend, Rich Wahnfried, has brutally murdered his girlfriend in his Florida condo and fled to Europe.
Bearing all the markings of social and economic privilege, intellectually gifted, imaginative, outrageously funny, often boisterous and dramatic — the commission of such a primitively violent sort of crime by Rich was unthinkable. The ghastly news that his good friend was a closeted monster detonates Frank’s confidence that he knows anyone, starting with himself. After learning of the murder, more unsavory details of Rich’s life emerge and increase Frank’s perplexity and the horror. The story unfolds and leads Frank, a law professor and political philosopher, to its culmination in a dramatic murder trial.
This philosophical novel follows Frank’s self-torturous path to understanding the darkness in the human condition.
Praise for fatal friendship
Fatal Friendship (FF) is an ambitious novel for adventurous readers. The author has tried to uncover the fragility of the human condition with a series of philosophical questions raised by an array of fascinatingly colorful characters. In deftly sardonic prose, FF explores the emotions and the meaning of those experiences that make life worth living: friendship, marriage and moral purpose. It also grapples with the mystery of the human heart and its potential for wickedness. The mystery of humanity lies in the inexplicability of its wickedness and the precariousness of its goodness.
The plot centers on the lives of two best friends, Frank and Rich. Both men are brilliant intellectuals – Frank a law professor and philosopher; Rich a gifted linguist and novelist. Both have marriages that fail. Both men differ profoundly in their personalities and world views. Richly ironic is that those differences form their bond of affection and are the source of their mutual respect. Frank still loves his ex-wife and mourns his loss of her. He also discovers to his horror that Rich has brutally murdered his girlfriend. Additional horrors emerge for Frank that turn Rich suddenly into an ex-friend and make him an increasingly challenging and torturous study in the nature of evil. The novel unfolds with Frank’s attempts to grasp the dimensions of moral betrayal and depravity in a man whose intellect he so deeply admired – yet another personal loss that in its shocking dimensions of violence and wickedness seems incomprehensible.
FF culminates dramatically in Frank’s appearance as a prosecution witness in Rich’s murder trial that brilliantly showcases another philosophical dimension of the novel – the question of the morality of death for a convicted murderer. What punishment is fitting for the crime of taking an innocent life?
Fatal Friendship is a mesmerizing read from start to finish that grapples with those dysgenic aspects of life in the modern, secularized world — the loss of religion, hedonistic atomism, the fracture of community and the nihilism of popular culture.
-John Rudisill, Ph.D. Emeritus Dean and Professor, Wright State University
We can tell that this book is going to be post-modern/frivolous (in a good way) as we learn that it is divided into four parts and each part is named after a few words from a popular song, from Roberta Flack to AC/DC. This style is going to continue.
We start with the decidedly neurotic Francis Herbert Bradley, named after a philosopher I had never heard of and who is quoted later on. He wrote a book called Appearance and Reality, whose title is very relevant to this book.
This book is subtitled “A Philosophical Novel,” and the author is a philosopher, so we get quite a few of these references. Francis (whose friends call him Frank) was planning on writing a Guide for the Perplexed, “a manual for the little man to prevail against the choreographed Tartufferies, to sniff out the frauds and denounce the fatuous, little emperors posturing sans ropa.” Clever little joke: ropa sans is a font but here we have French and Spanish mixed to mean without clothes. Postmodern means lots more little jokes of this nature.
The issue of whether we are inherently good or bad and, and, indeed, other philosophical conundrums, the complex trial of Rich and what happens afterwards and the many borrowed names and other postmodern games make this book both a good read, while giving us a lot to mull over. As for Frank and his Guide for the Perplexed, he concludes, quoting Rilke: “Wer spricht von Siegen? Uberstehn is alles.” Who speaks of victories? Endurance is everything.” And he may well be right.
With the philosophy, the plot, and the postmodernism, this is an enjoyable read.
-John Alvey The Modern Novel
Excerpts
Francis H. Bradley woke late one morning from a long, restless sleep and immediately perceived that something was eerily different. No, he had not turned into a large cockroach overnight, like Kafka’s Herr Gregor. A quick inspection of all his working parts showed them to be in proper order. After some moments of anxious introspection, he realized that the change was the lifting of a mental fog. He had come into possession of a clear moral vision. The world made sense. His recently muddled past had come into…What was the word eluding him?
“Perspective.”
Yes, Francis had for some time lacked perspective. To understand why, consider what “perspective” means: a particular attitude toward or way of regarding something; a point of view. It was this particular that had kept shifting whatever attitude happened to, in any given moment, descend upon him. His point of view had been depressingly transient. Treading in mazes of complexity, he had struggled to navigate his way through the bullshit spewed out by that complex web of indoctrinating forces in American society that operate under various euphemisms — popular culture, higher education, the mainstream media, and “our democracy.”
Perspective. That is what he had needed ever since he had conceived the idea of pulling his random thoughts together, putting his dark, angry feelings aside and turning the contemplation of his own shortcomings into something useful for others, something from which he could derive a sense of satisfaction and higher purpose. Useful, you ask? The task would be useful in that Francis intended it to be a “Guide for the Perplexed,” a manual for the little man to prevail against the choreographed Tartufferies, to sniff out the frauds and denounce the fatuous, little emperors posturing sans ropa.
His inspiration for this “Guide” came from the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: “But life is short, and truth works far and long; let us speak the truth.”
-opening to Chapter One
How could he not have seen signs of murder in the eyes of his friend? Failure gnawed at him. He compared his current state of mind with Nestorius, the Christian patriarch, on the eve of his proscription and exile for heresy. Edward Gibbon had remarked of him: “The past he regretted, he was discontented with the present, and the future he had reason to dread.” Past, present, and future had collapsed in Frank’s consciousness into a muddle of regret, discontent, and dread.
Since learning that Rich must have been concealing powerfully savage impulses, Frank had thrown himself into absorbing the details of the crime and following the course of what had become an FBI-initiated manhunt. His friends and colleagues were exceptionally circumspect when talking to him about the shocking revelation of the homicide. Frank couldn’t help but wonder if they were thinking: “What’s with you, with friends like that?” Could he be sullied by his association with the Petacci slayer? He couldn’t shake that feeling.
Birds fly. Flowers bloom. Summer follows Spring. Men kill their girlfriends. Well, they do so often enough that any particular ghastly story of such senseless savagery becomes a back page news blurb and a one-time, two-minute filler on the local, ten o’clock news. Just another ho-hum, “Dog bites man” story — Reductio ad nihilo.
The Claretta Petacci murder, however, proved to be “Man bites dog.” It had aroused the usually fickle attention of news purveyors nationwide. The reason was that the prime suspect was a remarkable departure from that of the typical loser who works himself into a violent temper and up-and-slays his defenseless girlfriend.
-from Chapter Three
Both men were voracious readers of history and politics. Each was amazed at the depth of knowledge amassed by the other and his ability to recall obscure but relevant details to support the thrust of an argument. Their mentalities presented themselves as a clash of both substance and style and a reflection of the radically different origins of their intellectual formation. Frank’s thinking was greatly influenced by Edward Gibbon’s massive Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edmund Burke, Thomas Hobbes, and David Hume — each of whom attended to delineating the frailties built into human nature.
Richard’s philosophical influences came from French thinkers, beginning with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His theory of the “General Will” and his invention of “the noble savage” inspired the French revolutionaries with their rush toward moral perfectionism so famously and fanatically embodied in the life of Maximillian Robespierre. Rousseau’s pernicious thinking — two-hundred and twenty years after his death — had hardened into the permafrost of Western left-wing ideology. Also, he was drawn to Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialism and the post-modern leftists, such as Derrida and Foucault.
Their politics, as well, differed markedly.
Richard embraced the contemporary myths about the march of progress and the conquest of liberal democracy over superstition and tyranny. Stalinism, so long and widely embraced by illuminati in the West — communism put into lethal practice — had conspicuously gone bust. The true believers had forsaken Marx and his theoretical bet on the triumphant future of the proletariat and, in its place, had come to embrace Western liberal values married to free-trade and mixed with sexual “liberation” far and wide and multicultural diversity. Nations would become increasingly “connected” through commercial-financial interests — a “global village” — and embrace the theology of “human rights,” the bulwark of the globalist-asserted moral superiority and the rationale for its world domination.
Richard now confidently averred that liberal democracy — democracy “managed” by the best and the brightest — would render reactionary thinking, authoritarian governing, and backward ways obsolete. The whole world, at some point in the future, would resemble contemporary Scandinavia. It would be a world of demolished hierarchies, smart consumers tolerant of everything but intolerance, well-behaved citizens, who carefully planned for a comfortable retirement while pursuing the enjoyments of the moment. The past, marked by violent conflict — wars, revolutions, class oppression and exploitation, racial discrimination — was receding. The future would be something comparable to the culmination of Hegel’s “World Historical Spirit.” “The owl of Minerva begins its flight only at dusk” — the end of human history. This decisive conquest over mankind’s “darker angels” would finally be accomplished. The new, archetypical world citizen would wield a kind of power unprecedented across the annals of time, the power to utter that command translatable into a hundred languages, six words that make attainment of the good life complete for everyone, everywhere: “Put it on my Visa Card!”
-from Chapter Eight
Charlotte was now laughing in a way that signaled her guilty pleasure. Then, a pause, in which she gave Frank a look of encouragement to continue his caustic blitzkrieg.
“These critics practice what — by someone whose name I now forget — is called ‘obscurantisme terroriste’ (terrorism of obscurantism). They utter stuff that’s out of left-field — puzzling, obscure, like ‘dangerous,’ ‘glamour,’ for example. That’s the obscurantism part. Then, when you ask: ‘What exactly do you mean by “glamour”?’ They say: ‘It’s obvious. You must be an idiot to have to ask.’ That’s the terrorism part. With Makovsky, no random word generator is required for a manufactured appreciation, no panjandrum toting his bag of superlatives to make you pretend to be impressed. You have to pull yourself away.”
Frank suddenly seemed embarrassed by going full bore with this acerbic riff and stopped abruptly.
“I’m sorry. I’ve been rude. What do you think of White Light?”
-from Chapter Eleven
The Bradley-Corday marriage, however, was ill-fated, beginning at the end of the “I do’s.”
How could that be? Why would that be?
Every marriage contains built-in detonators that will ignite explosive material at different times once the S.S. Nuptial has sailed out of the wedding harbor and on to the marital high seas. Some of the materials are light in explosive power — more like fire-crackers. They will go off on occasion and cause minor damage but not with the force to blow holes that will sink the ship. Some, however, are highly charged. They will, at some point, explode unpredictably and with disintegrative force. Enter the rescue crews — marriage counselors who attempt damage repair to save the sinking vessel. When they fail, as they often do, salvage teams are called upon. The divorce lawyers descend to conduct the salvage operations and extract whatever they can of material value. Often, the collateral damage is severe.
