Being succinct while still doing justice to Robert “Bob” Levin’s first novel, A Brief History of Howard, is not the easiest task. The author’s wife, Iris Levin, read the book six times during the editing and printing processes and is still constantly adjusting her synopsis.
“The elevator pitch for this book has changed several times. You don’t want to talk someone’s ear off; you want to give it to them in a nutshell,” the Mouzza Publications manager/publicist/producer said with a laugh. “All I can say is that it’s an astoundingly good story about a young man who struggles with obstacles.”
Bob himself admits to having difficulty summarizing his work, which tells the first portion of the tale of jazz guitarist Howard Stein. He likes what a friend suggested, that the book is about “how ancient wisdom is relevant to real life,” but he has a few bits of his own to add as well.
“It’s a story of good versus evil,” he said. “My character’s in a fight for his life, and he has to essentially incorporate a lot of different things in order to survive.”
Bob used many of his own past experiences while crafting the trials his protagonist would undergo. Howard is dealing with a tough illness, as Bob was in college. When Western medicine can’t help him, he seeks treatment through acupuncture, as Bob has many times.
The improvement Howard sees via the nontraditional practices begins to change his worldview, as he meshes the institutionalized, methodical university learning he’s known all his life with a more intuitive, instinctual Eastern approach. But it’s from these same new teachings that his antagonist, Dr. Wang, emerges.
At first he seems to help, but he’s actually stealing Howard’s ch’i, the word for the Chinese concept of “life force.” What Dr. Wang plots has him rated as one critic’s “top three most evil villains of all time.”
“An English literature major called and said, ‘This is like Iago bad,’” Iris said. “This is a nasty, awful man.”
The key to Howard’s avoiding doom is his developing ability to see situations and issues from multiple angles, including those he was brought up on and those he has recently been introduced to.
This ability also happens to be what Bob aims for his audience to take away from the book.
“I would like readers to be able to look at a situation and see it from a lot of different perspectives, and to look at themselves and see themselves from different perspectives,” he said. “I’m just hoping for a little flexibility, a little common sense.”
The whole, which has been praised as “JK Rowling meets Albert Einstein meets Gabriel García Márquez” and a “classic [with] gifted writing, intellectual stimulation and Hollywood suspense” by reviewers, has more to do with jazz than just its protagonist’s passion, as any Mouzza product would.
“It could read like a John Coltrane solo,” said Bob, a guitarist himself and jazz enthusiast since high school. “When it moves, when [Howard’s] ch’i, his soul, starts moving, the story starts moving, and you can’t put it down.”
“This is where he riffs,” Iris said with a smile, referring to her husband’s writing. “His whole life is a riff.”
