Powerless to be Born is a literary novel written with multiple layers. First, it is the story about Hemsley Nicholson, an artist and actor, who moves his family from New York City to central Pennsylvania, thus revealing the clash between urban and rural cultures. The reader follows him for five years through episodic experiences until reaching a climax which culminates in life-transforming conclusions. At the same time, his wife, Kathryn, is forced with this return to her hometown to confront the denied and buried past of her childhood and youth. Moreover, this novel is a mature love story about a married couple seeking rejuvenation of an earlier idyllic existence.
Second, it is an intense psychological study of various independent characters who collectively lay bare the broken, divisive heart of America, while being at the same time an examination of the social and political ailments that ravage the nation and the globe. Among this array of characters, the persistent presence of the Hencher family, whose internal antagonisms eventually reach shocking and climatic results, provides a polar antithesis to the Nicholsons.
Third, filled with detail from the artist's eye and the actor's analysis, the novel offers insight into the art world and dissolves illusions of grandeur in the thespian sphere. With enlivened observations and metaphors throughout relating to contemporary issues, historical and literary references, philosophical insights, and natural phenomena that should titillate the reader, the roots, analysis, and possible solutions of human frailties and global ailments are later examined through a series of Platonic-styled dialogues between the story's principal character and Erik Havlicek, an Eastern European immigrant to the United States.
Finally, at its deepest and most thematic layer, this book is about one man's search to free himself from the dualism of opposites into a trinary harmony of sublimity that could fulfill the protagonist's aesthetic aspirations, but more importantly, change the essence of individuals and alter the destiny of our planet.
In short, this novel offers the drama and tension, the humor and pathos, and the style and language of a fictional work of literature, but its insights into questions involving current issues, universal truths, and the discrepancies of human nature should be of immense interest to readers concerned about the choices that all of us need to make as individuals and as a species.
