Springtime for Passage Press
Springtime for Passage Press
The insurgent heterodox publisher makes its first stab at publishing fiction.
Something of the Springtime, by John King Spiezio. Passage Press, 280 pages.
I dislike writing book reviews. Not because I dislike books—I have far too many—but because I only ever want to review good ones. Positive reviews are far harder to write than negative.
It’s even more difficult to write reviews about fiction, since most are just adult book reports, and I myself dislike giving away too much of the plot despite being “that guy” who reads the last sentence of every book I pick up. My go-to line for recommending novels and movies is usually, “I think you would like this” accompanied by a pithy one-sentence description of the plot.
So after a long conversation at an event in Nashville last year about the merits of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, John King Spiezio told me that he was going to be the author of Passage Press’s debut novel. A long-time respecter of Jonathan Keeperman, better known by the Twitter handle L0m3z, I knew I would have to buy it. I asked Spiezio what I was in for. His reply: “A sensitive young man goes to Oxford and falls in love.”
A few months later, Something of the Springtime arrived on my doorstep. The box was drenched, courtesy of our Third-World postal service, but thankfully the book was intact. Normally, there isn’t a need to comment on the physical aspect of the book, as most are usually mass market paperbacks with banal cover art and thin paper, but for the $30 you spend, Passage Press makes it worth your while. Already known widely on the internet for their high quality hardcover “Patrician Editions” of Curtis Yarvin and Steve Sailer, the same eye for detail and quality is given to Springtime. You really do feel as if you are in possession of something made to last, a trait that is sorely lacking in today’s publishing industry.
As for the content, the story is set in the late 19th-century and surrounds the misadventures of an Oxford don of Old Norse Languages, the American James Dalthey, as he comes to grips with returning to stateside, his place in academia, his relationship with God, and his place with another woman.
A very brief aside—while Springtime isn’t exactly historical fiction, as there is no historical happening that is central to the plot, it is more genuinely immersed in its world and time than, say, Amor Towles’s beach-book-turned-miniseries, A Gentleman in Moscow, that seemed to have its historical setting serve as a background for 21st-century characters and dialogue.
I knew from the first sentence—“The cornerstone of good life is a good humor”—that I was in for a lovely read. It is a rare thing for prose to glide effortlessly off the page and into the mind’s ear. Nothing feels forced. There are no glaring anachronisms, no “woahs” or “’sups,” nor does the language feel like a historical pastiche. The dialogue seems as real as the setting, a very uncommon feat.
This authentically immersive quality heightens Springtime’s overall themes and especially the central meaning given to place—home and the lack thereof—that looms large over the work. At times, it reads as a great love letter to the English university. Spiezio himself is a graduate of Oxford’s Brasenose College, and faithfully captures university life and England itself as, to borrow a phrase from Eliot, the “intersection of the timeless moment.” The descriptions Spiezio gives of the walks, the inns, the sounds, smells, and beat of steady rain make his story feel intimately lived-in.
This theme of finding home is expressed by the characters themselves—James, an American, his academic mentor, Gudbrand Vigfusson, an Icelandic transplant and army of one, who serves as the college’s inaugural chairman of Scandinavian studies due to the English intelligentsia’s fascination with its ancient roots.
At the story’s outset, James is immediately presented with an offer from the dying Gudbrand to take over as chairman and make a life in England as he did. This decision racks James for the rest of the novel; he feels that he has come to this point in his life simply by not having anything better to do. At the same time, he has recurring thoughts of returning to America to become a painter. Gudbrand, a foreigner, has abandoned his home and made it his life’s work to establish this department; he feels very much that his newly made home is in jeopardy if James does not accept his offer.
This decision gains complexity when James receives news that his mother suddenly died and that he already missed the funeral. With his sister his only living relation of note, James feels even more isolated and confused as to whether a move back to America would even carry the same meaning or if there was even anything to go back to.
To complicate matters, a love story between James and Emma, the unhappy wife of a “Wagnerite” intellectual, emerges a third of the way into the novel. Here, James finds crystalized his internal conflicts—and the solution to them. Emma is the kind of woman who gives birth to a vision of a better world for James, one that he wants, but one that is also entirely a fantasy. At a certain point James confesses to himself that he is disgusted by his pursuit of the adulterous relationship in the first place, but realizes that it was an outgrowth of this “lack of something better to do in his life.” Among many strands, including the conflict between Anglo-Catholic Christianity and “Wagnerism,” the purpose of academic pursuits, the ambiguity of national identity, and notions of philosophical progress, it is the love story that is the most gripping.
James finds no easy or conclusive answers to his questions—but what good novel ever ties up all its Irish pennants? Springtime leaves us in its titular season, among the vernal possibilities. An auspicious start for Passage Press’s own flowering.
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