The Girl in the Café

A Novel

By: Morris Berman

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Michael Holdin, an author and journalist, meets Julia, an aspiring artist, in a neighborhood bar. They hit it off, and start a relationship. Michael encourages her to show her paintings to an upscale art gallery, which leads to a very successful show. She then does two series of paintings based on Anthony Powell’s book A Dance to the Music of Time, involving voyeurism. Enter Miriam, an attractive hospital administrator in her forties, which eventually leads to the formation of a ménage à trois. Julia starts administering breathing exercises to people who seek to be free of their “isms,” their ingrained beliefs. The three of them begin to explore the possibilities of teaching empathy, in the course of which Michael is attacked by a right-wing zealot. He escapes unharmed, and is lionized by young Americans seeking guidance for their lives. He tells them to find something they love and pursue it with complete authenticity and dedication. It becomes a movement, the Full Living Society (FLS), and attracts thousands. Meanwhile, the White House, severely threatened by all this, declares happiness to be un-American, and calls them terrorists, but nobody pays any attention to these ravings. As the FLS becomes a worldwide movement, America continues on a downward path toward disintegration and collapse, and a possible New World appears on the horizon.

Morris Berman is a poet, novelist, essayist, social critic, and cultural historian. He has written twenty-seven books and nearly 200 articles, and has taught at a number of universities in Europe, North America, Chile, and Mexico. He won the Governor’s Writers Award for Washington State in 1990, and was the first recipient of the annual Rollo May Center Grant for Humanistic Studies in 1992. In 2000, The Twilight of American Culture was named a “Notable Book” by the New York Times Book Review, and in 2013 he received the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity from the Media Ecology Association. Dr. Berman lives in Mexico.