Dead Letters: A Correspondence Novel

Two reprobates from Cleveland exchanged irreverent and melodramaticletters coast-to-coast to each other in the days of the late 1970s and the early 1980s.It was a unique time after The Pill and before AIDS. It was a transition from the post-Watergate years to the era of Ronald Reagan. A new TV program, Saturday Night Live, was ushering in a new youth culture to replace the post 1950s world of Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best. This correspondence novel is a collection letters between two smart ass Kent State University grads, Martin Rose, a Jewish artist and Bryan Ryan, a Catholic writer. Both were ego-maniacs oozing delusions of grandeur. A year before, the two sat in the living room of their dilapidated off-campus house trying to outdo each other in pithy bursts of creative hubris fueled by coffee, cigarettes and reefer. They met as broadcasting majors. Rose had been thrown out of the art department and Ryan had been heaved heartily from the school of journalism. Both went into the relatively new field of TV Communications before that was a viable career path. After graduating by the skin of their teeth, Rose headed for Los Angeles and fringe art infamy, while Ryan set his sights on the life of a writer inNew York City and the Great American Novel. This is the story of something most college graduates have been hit with in their early 20s, especially true for these two Ohioans in that inflation-stunned period when Punk was still edgy as it turned into a bastardization some called New Wave: the shocking reality check of watching one's raw lofty, seeming original aspirations turn into dashed hopes and crushed ambition. In these unique days between the Hippies and the USA as an unwieldy Marketing Scheme, Ryan and Rose here embody the age old necessary role of but soon-to-be-discarded, wince-inducing but occasionally wise madcap quipsters. As they amuse and verbally assault each other, their epistolary pugilism provides a rye commentary on what is now a bygone and largely unexplored that just may crack you up.