The Western Village

Abstract

Thomas Fur, an amateur writer going through a midlife crisis, decides to quit his job and move to the Western Village, a small town on the Chesapeake Bay. He rents the basement of the house of Mrs. Vivian, a sixty-five-year-old widow. Given that only elderly people live in the village, Thomas feels that this place away from the busy towns appeals to him. The village, where only two things alternate, the dying old residents and the eternal sea, becomes the final destination, a reinvented frontier for a man who wants to overcome his limitations. After arriving in the village, Thomas decides to write a novel. He uses the aging residents as characters for his literary project. For the very reason, he makes several acquaintances there, including a former criminal who works as a gravedigger's assistant, a veteran turned hunter and fisherman, and a bartender and her sister. Thomas, unable to express his love to Mrs. Vivian, hires an unknown man to write love letters to her. He even helps her respond to these letters. What has started as a game soon turns into a strange love relationship. Thomas later confronts the only physician in the town, Doctor Schroeder, who also works as a gravedigger. Doctor Schroeder makes money off the old people either way: if he cures them, he bills them while they are alive, and if he fails, he bills the deceased people's relatives for their death. Later, Thomas discovers that Doctor Schroeder is a souls' collector. He locks up the dead's souls in glass bottles. Thomas's confrontation with the doctor turns into the final tragedy in his life. At the end of the novel, we are left perplexed, not knowing whether Thomas invented the village and its residents to write his novel or whether it was a real chapter in his life, or whether Thomas himself was a fictional character in real people's life.