(Author tour)įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. This is the weakest of Quinn's novels, but his ideas are as thought-provoking as ever, even so. Instead, the novel is increasingly taken up with the mysteries surrounding Ishmael's travels and fate. This is all very well, but what does Ishmael/Quinn suggest be done to redeem the Takers, and to save the earth? Quinn seems to want to sketch out how change might come about, but it's never fully explored. Moving beyond his theories about Leavers and Takers, Ishmael presents a detailed critique of educational systems around the world, suggesting that their function is not to usefully educate but to regulate the flow of workers into a Taker society. Once again, the gentle ape shares his wisdom in a series of questions and answers that resemble, in method, a blend of the Socratic dialogues and programmed learning. Julie responds to Ishmael's ad seeking a pupil with an earnest desire to save the world (a conceit carried over from the earlier novel). This time out, though, he invents a lively figure, 12-year-old Julie Gerchak, who is tough and wise beyond her years, having had to deal with a self-destructive, alcoholic mother. Quinn's books have not featured many memorable characters, aside from Ishmael. The Takers, who have generally overwhelmed them, began as aggressive farmers obsessed with growth, were the builders of cities and empires, and have now, in the late 20th century, largely run out of space to monopolize. The planet's original inhabitants, the Leavers, were nomadic people who did no harm to the earth. Once more, Quinn focuses on the Leavers and Takers, his terms for the two basic, warring kinds of human sensibility. Another irresistible rant from Quinn, a sequel to his Turner Tomorrow Fellowship winner, Ishmael (1992), concerning a great, telepathic ape who dispenses ecological wisdom about the possible doom of humankind.

My ishmael book