OUT OF ARCADIA: Toward a More Hopeful, Comprehensive, and Redemptive World Vision
By Dr. William Graddy, Professor Emeritus, Trinity International University
Mark Twain famously prefaces Huckleberry Finn, that fountainhead of American coming-of-age novels, with a stern “Notice” that amounts to a “Keep Out” sign for literary critics, or the likes of me: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. By Order of The Author.”
Fortunately for me and my interpretive tribe, Nicholas D. Kokonis is of a much milder bent. But he does, like Mr. Clemens before him, spell out his own reservations about the reductionism and artificiality that crouch close, as sin did Cain’s, to every literary critic’s door. Late in Book 2 of Out of Arcadia, Angelo takes a summer course, an introduction to literature, from a Professor Neuff. “Thrilled” to study under “a real writer,” and awakened perhaps for the first time to the dream of authoring “a story about Arcadia and its struggling people,” Angelo hears, never to forget, the following: “Read what you like, regardless of notes and critical comments as to what you ought to seek and find. To read and enjoy good stories is with me the main thing; to analyze the author’s style or explain your own enjoyment seems of secondary importance” (327).
I agree. Yet I am going to spend the next several minutes trying to elucidate some of the key features of author Kokonis’s style, and I am going to try to indicate in a suggestive, not authoritarian, way why this new novel deserves careful and repeated readings, and why, though celebrative of past generations, it speaks so relevantly even urgently to the present one.
Perhaps the first fact we have to deal with if we are to meet author Kokonis on his own terms is this: just as the bedrock theme of both his novels is education and its transformative power, he himself writes as a learned, deeply literate individual. Although modest and servant-like in spirit, Out of Arcadia’s narrator often sends even bookish readers knowing only English scrambling for their dictionaries. His glimpse of a cashier Angelo meets reveals “a fat and hirsute woman”(225). Describing Angelo’s shaky first day as a busboy in Chicago’s Sherman House restaurant, the narrator notices his long-underfed hero’s chagrin at the scale of affluent America’s waste: “At times he was tempted to grab a piece of juicy steak and wolf it down, but his Greek philotimo prevented him” (133). At the drop of a hat, Tarco, Angelo’s irrepressible Cuban friend, quotes Homer in “perfect, well-articulated Attic Greek,” carries around with him a Loeb Classical Library edition of Lysias, and, while explaining his wildly polyglot set of names, mentions offhandedly that he fell in love with Plutarch’s Parallel Lives when he was in grade school (215).
Indeed, as we follow these transformative three years in Angelo’s life and education, we see in almost every chapter his, and author Kokonis’s passion for learning. But not, as Professor Neuff warns us, the sterile pride of pedantry or the jejune pursuit of analysis for its own sake. For if Kokonis reveres education, he also shows us with fervent conviction that knowledge cut off from life, as surely as does innovation severed from tradition or the individual separated from family and community—stunts and sometimes kills, as all three literally do in the tragic case of Professor Scharlick, the brilliant research psychologist who commits suicide when his career declines and his marriage fails (Chapters 24, 27).
Please notice with me that what we have encountered in identifying this first and seemingly straightforward feature of Nicholas Kokonis’s literary style—his wide-ranging erudition—is in fact not simple at all, but on closer scrutiny turns out to be a duality, an array of binaries (knowing and being, thinking and feeling, openness to change and rootedness in the past) that to be productive rather than harmful, must always exist together and in tension.
Kokonis’s characters are grafted with apparent talent. Simo, introduced about halfway through the novel and characterized with brilliance worthy of Dickens at his best, lives out a vital, yet punishing set of eccentricities that, we later learn, stem largely from a tragic and abusive past. Racked by superstitious fears yet sincerely worshipful, Simo’s vital libido has been savaged by rape in her youth and deprived by the premature death of one husband and the crassness and sexual inadequacy of a second, who beat her badly when, in bed with him, she, a Cretan, called him a “Minotaur.” Classically astute readers will appreciate not just the poignant aptness of the allusion−Simo is trapped in a labyrinth of cruelty and poverty, but will appreciate the frustration and humiliation to which Simo’s mythical reference gives voice: some ancient works represented the Minotaur as having the face of a bull, but the body of a man.
Both the spirit and the guiding intellectual lights of Roosevelt University, in some senses the real hero of Out of Arcadia, defy classicism’s neat categories just as Angelo learns to do. Professor Neuff’s critique of the merely analytical, Wally Franklin’s positive and comprehensive humanity, President Rolph Weill’s integration of Greek learning with the modern disciplines of the social sciences—all point to a more hopeful and comprehensive world view.
Kokonis’s genius, I believe, what is lasting and grippingly poignant in his voice, lies in a similar integrative vision that is in the end redemptive. If this second novel begins with the racist, ignorant spewings of Zaferis, it closes with the eloquence of Harold Washington’s Roosevelt graduation address. If it begins with separation from home, it ends with two weddings that themselves meld ancient Greek customs and genuinely Christian piety. The struggle of privation and choice, embodied in Carracci’s painting, The Choice of Hercules (see esp. Ch. 29), issues in new homes anchored in marriage. Simo’s garden finally flowers under Dino’s cultivation, and Angelo’s last words to Tarco ring beautifully true: “Wait and hope. All human wisdom is contained in these two words.
Reading Out of Arcadia left me filled with ideas, even zeal, for this novel: its literary excellences, its keen insights, and its prophetic relevance. Angelo's struggle throughout the novel is to grow into the full dignity of personhood. He must resist, in other words, those who would scornfully equate him with, or measure him by, his impoverished and humble class status ("vlahos," "Dee-Pee"). His calling is not to deny, apologize for, repudiate, or obscure his name, but to redeem its true status, making it, in other words, a proper rather than a common noun. To do so, he must embrace a set of dualities, or tensions, that I can see running through both Kokonis’s novels. His first name (Angelo, "messenger of God) implies that he is a spiritual being ("ah golden boy," his mother correctly terms him). By flying to America at the end of the first novel he literally takes wings, just as by graduating with highest honors and marrying, he figuratively takes wings at the end of the second). His middle name ("Demos") speaks to the commonness, the earthiness if you will, of the human predicament. He is, in other words, both spiritual and human, both special and common, both aristocrat and servant. This double-pronged notion of the goodness and worth inherent in being human is doubly his birthright, as it is a cardinal feature of both his ancient Greet lineage, and in his Judeo-Christian faith, whose two central doctrines (creation and incarnation) hold that human beings are fallen yet redeemed.
As I think more and more about this wonderful new second novel, I become more and more convinced that it should be widely adopted (and well taught) in middle, high school, and college classrooms. The novel shows engagingly and dramatically that the development of arete, philotimo, or virtue is essential to full humanity. That development requires a painful and daunting journey. It requires a departure from, a putting behind, of the past. It requires an education, a transcending of the "givens" of every individual's life, an aspiration toward those things our dreams call us to.
At the same time, though, Nicholas Kokonis’s Out of Arcadia shows eloquently that though we must leave our Arcadias, we must never repudiate or lose touch with them. Like Simo, we must carry soil from our birthplaces, however painful and impoverished they were, with us. And Angelo knows his past more fully, better than his parents, precisely because he has been educated. In other words, the very thing that calls and lights the way beyond and out of our past, enriches our sense of that past.
Increasingly, this generation is forgetting its past, and as it does, it carries with it only the faintest conception of virtue. Virtue can't call if its language can't be understood, and it can't attract if its beauty has never been seen. How many young people today, impoverished or not, have parents like Angelo's? How many ethnic communities survive in which, a continent away, a successful Greek or Russian or Brazilian or Zambian teen can hear a countryman say, "I knew your mother. Does she still sell seeds?"
Kokonis’s books need to be read by the young while they can still be understood, and understanding requires some sense of the past. Lacking this, a soon-coming future generation will find itself quite literally Out Of Arcadia, and will have no key by which to return. I think this is what St. Paul says when he commands us to redeem the time while it is still day (Ephesians) and to work, "for the night is coming."—William Graddy, Ph.D.
Nicholas D. Kokonis’s Out of Arcadia: A STUNNING SECOND NOVEL ONE SHOULD NOT MISS
By Linda Morelli, Award-winning author of Fiery Surrender and Shadow of Doubt
Angelo Vlahos leaves for America in September 1960 in the hopes of earning enough money to help support his family in Greece. Antigone, his grade school sweetheart, now attends the Ohio State University in Columbus, another impetus for him to leave Arcadia, his home. On the plane he meets fellow Greek Barba Dino, whose cousin gives them both a job in New York that eventually pays for Angelo’s trip to Chicago.
Soon as Angelo arrives in Chicago, he obtains a job at the Billy Goat Tavern that allows him to pay for his living expenses and send a little money home. When he finally earns enough to go to Columbus to see Antigone, he learns that she was killed. The news shatters Angelo, but he knows that he must fulfill his purpose of getting an education and a good job to support his family.
The American Institute he attends is different than Angelo expected, with students from many countries who also had come to America under similar circumstances. He makes friends with several students, but all isn’t rosy for Angelo. The Institute is not a legitimate school and Angelo cannot afford its high tuition and other fees. He had accepted a fake bank certificate that allowed him to leave his home in Arcadia, and now owes money to the Institute’s owner who presents him with a choice: either immediate payment or deportation. Angelo realizes he has violated a moral, ethical, and legal code, and is tormented, knowing he must pay the consequences. He does so thanks to the generosity of good-hearted George M. Prassos of the A & P fame. “It was like one of the ancient miracles,” Kokonis writes, “a sign that there was an eye which saw and a scale wherein even the acts of the poor and unimportant were weighed. If he could visualize God at that moment, He would have the face of George M. Prassos.”
Angelo is ultimately accepted to Roosevelt University, and through his perseverance, works at two jobs while studying to get good grades. His hard work pays off, for he eventually gains a full scholarship and graduates cum laude. He also moves to a small room with an elderly and eccentric Greek landlady, Mrs. Simo Sifakis, who finds Angelo an additional job as a tutor teaching Greek.
Out of Arcadia: The American Odyssey of Angelo Vlahos is the second work by Nicholas D. Kokonis that I have read and thoroughly enjoyed. It isn’t necessary to have read the first release, Arcadia, My Arcadia, as this novel can stand on its own merit. In this novel, Angelo is a young man of 19 who has seen poverty and hopes for a better future, not only for himself, but his family as well. Once in America, he is dazed by the differences between this new country and Arcadia, and realizes he has much to learn. The owner of Billy Goat, another Arcadian, tells Angelo that, though life in Arcadia was rough, it gave them the greatest gift they could receive: the strength they need to endure. This, I believe, is the gist of this novel: that with faith, perseverance, and hard work, one can survive and, more importantly, succeed.
Out of Arcadia by Nicholas Kokonis is a stunning second novel that involves the reader from the very first pages. Mr. Kokonis is a powerful author whose vivid descriptions and writing style is reminiscent of the great works of many classical and modern authors, including Steinbeck. The images Mr. Kokonis paints with words drew me into Angelo’s story, the events and characters, as well as the emotions they feel and the pain they suffer. Out of Arcadia is a delightful, engrossing read, and one you shouldn't miss.