Vy Armour
Allen Levi wrote his extraordinary novel Theo of Golden with no plans to publish it and an audience of one in mind.
“I thought to myself very consciously: When I die, I will take this manuscript and I will stand in the presence of my God and my Christ, and I will say, ‘Lord, this is a present that I made for you.’ And that satisfies me completely.”
Yet, his self-published story of a mysterious stranger who arrives one day to captivate and ultimately elevate a Georgia town through simple kindness and empathy has gone viral the old-fashioned way: by quickly putting a staggering 150,000 books in people’s hands, largely through an excited word of mouth.
The homespun Georgian’s wholly unsolicited success is all the more astounding when you consider it’s the 69-year-old lawyer, former judge, and modern-day troubadour’s first novel.
In Levi’s learned, deft hand, Theo of Golden is a gentle, moving reminder that there’s no such thing as an “ordinary” person and that while navigating gut-wrenching sorrow in this life, each one of us not only is extraordinary but perhaps capable of some form of saintliness.
We often hear people say something restored their faith in mankind. This book truly does.
After spending “the best year of my life, bar none,” devoted to loving on his dying brother Gary—a “best friend, mentor, neighbor”—and being a short-term judge and caring for his parents and the land where he lived, he changed his life yet again in a most unassuming act.
“One day I walked into a coffee shop,” he says matter-of-factly. That day, he found himself admiring a friend’s various portraits of locals on the shop’s walls. “I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to buy all of these portraits and find their rightful owner?” and he decided to buy five of them, later contemplating the subtleties of their unique faces at home.
He realized he had the seed corn for Theo of Golden.
Still, Levi saw writing the book as simply “an expression of my faith,” as well as a test of his writing ability, honed by years of “telling stories” in court briefs and cases.
“I wanted to see if I had the stamina to write long fiction,” he told the audience at the Franklin Theater in Tennessee. “So, I knuckled down and finished it and said, ‘mission accomplished—I have written a piece of long fiction, and nobody is ever going to see it.’”
Even now, as he works on a sequel, he says, “We are not trying to sell books. We are trying to bless people and to bring something good into the world.”
As evidence that he has, Carol, a retired English teacher who had just months to live and who had centuries of literature to share with students on an internet class she’d started, told Levi, “The last book that I want to read with my students is Theo of Golden.”
“I see the same bad news you do,” an emotional Levi tells the crowd. “But if you could see you like I see you now—or like I saw Carol and her friends—you would say, ‘Yeah, there’s a lot of bad in the world but, by God, there’s a lot of good.’” And if we do our parts, we can drown it out.
When famed southern author Pat Conroy’s mother described to him Atlanta’s ardent devotion to the new book Gone With The Wind, he once wrote, “It was the first time I knew that literature had the power to change the world.”
Such is the gentlemanly genius of Theo of Golden.