Searching for life’s answers

AMERICAN historian Henry Brooks Adams famously defined philosophy as “unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.” That doesn’t stop the protagonist of Robert Hellenga’s fourth novel, “Philosophy Made Simple,” from turning to the great thinkers to try to figure out “before it was too late ... the meaning and purpose of human existence.”

Seven years after the death of his wife, 60-year-old Rudy Harrington still misses her terribly. Seeking to fill his life with new meaning, he quits his job at the Chicago produce market, sells the old house in which he raised his three daughters, and buys an avocado grove on Texas’ Rio Grande.

Rudy also embarks on a ridiculously earnest trek through the history of philosophy, as summarized in an eponymous student handbook written by the uncle of his daughter’s fiance, Tejinder. Not surprisingly, he meets with repeated frustrations. He is exasperated by Immanuel Kant’s ideas on the nature of existence, the “thing-in-itself.” “What good was the Ding an sich if you could never get your hands on it?” Rudy wonders.

Hellenga’s attempt to incorporate an overview of the history of philosophy into a seriocomic narrative -- and thereby render the philosophy more palatable and the fiction more weighty -- brings to mind Jostein Gaarder’s “Sophie’s World.” The effort to apply philosophy as a salve for personal problems also evokes Alain de Botton’s “The Consolations of Philosophy.” But despite the considerable clarity and charm of Hellenga’s prose, the weighty ideas and antic plot of “Philosophy Made Simple” often seem artificially imposed on each other, like freshman-year roommates forced to coexist.

Readers may remember Rudy’s family from Hellenga’s luscious first novel, “The Sixteen Pleasures” (1994). His youngest daughter is Margot Harrington, a book conservator who, in rushing to Florence after the 1966 flood to help save a waterlogged convent library, finds a rare erotic manuscript -- and passion with an older, married Italian.

“Philosophy Made Simple” presents the Harringtons from the stateside, paternal angle. Although purportedly set in 1967, its professional, sexually liberated female characters, multicultural atmosphere, and general sensibility feel suspiciously contemporary.

Rudy’s late wife, Helen, plays a pivotal role in both novels. She, too, had a passionate affair with an Italian during a year spent teaching art history in Florence in the 1950s. The realization that her diagnosis with cancer is what caused her to come home still gnaws at Rudy. In the years it took Helen to die, the Harringtons never discussed her affair. But on her deathbed, Helen recorded tapes because she had things she wanted to tell her family, although not face-toface.

The discovery that the recorder malfunctioned is a stunning moment in “The Sixteen Pleasures.” In “Philosophy Made Simple,” Rudy keeps coming back to those blank tapes, which take on metaphoric significance about the unyielding inscrutability of life itself.

In Texas, Rudy filters his adventures through various philosophical doctrines. Upon reading that Aristotle deemed happiness the “ ‘supreme good,’ the end at which all actions aim,” he wonders, “would he be happy here? Would he find something final and self-sufficient?” Should he live simply, as Epicurus recommended? Can Descartes’ mind-body problem shed light on the temptation to accompany his grove manager across the Mexican border for female companionship? Was Schopenhauer correct that life was “boredom on the one hand, anxiety on the other”?

Rudy gets a taste of Eastern philosophy while making arrangements for his daughter’s Hindu wedding. The pandit he consults exhorts him to “escape from desire.” Molly and Tejinder’s wedding is a multicultural extravaganza that even features a representative of Ganesh, the god of wisdom and problem-solving, in the form of a Russian neighbor’s retired circus elephant, Narmada-Jai. As a favor to her owner, Rudy has been boarding Narmada-Jai since she saved his life after a heart attack by lifting him onto a flatbed truck. Among the elephant’s talents are painting abstract art that sells to hotels for thousands of dollars. Conveniently, the sari-clad widowed mother of the groom -- with whom Rudy becomes smitten -- knows how to handle pachyderms.

Unable to find the answers he seeks, Rudy rails at philosophy’s shortcomings, concluding, “The things that matter most to us are unknowable. . . . Death, beauty, love, sex, pain.” Hellenga’s novel, meanwhile, teeters precariously between serious questions and madcap capers, between scrutiny and screwball. It’s like riding an elephant you can’t quite control.

Heller McAlpin is a regular contributor to Book Review and other publications.