Confessions of a Lapsed Altar Boy

“Confessions of a Lapsed Altar Boy” reveals the previously unknown details of a fictional, violent crime not committed in California in 1976 by the remnants of the Symbionese Liberation Army. After the father of the teenaged victim of a kidnapping, Nathan Hale Plunkett, declined to cooperate with law enforcement over privacy concerns, young Plunkett grew up to become a best-selling historian featured on the cover of Time magazine.

"Confessions" is an absurdist comedy of sex, manners, and historiography that takes place in the context of a young man drifting away from Catholicism, fleeing his suffocating parents, dealing with rejection from Harvard, and seeking to correct the mistakes of the historian Arnold Toynbee.

Set in the San Francisco Bay Area, Washington DC, and New York City of the seventies and eighties, readers follow Nathan as he forms an unbreakable bond with classmates Milo and Cilla, successfully blackmails a federal law enforcement officer, is disinherited by his father, saves his archnemesis from arrest, nearly kills a famous rock star, finds a mentor to help him finish his history, and begins to envision a life spent with the woman haunting his dreams.

“Confessions” is intended for fans of “Mad Men” and Joan Didion, who reside in the intersection of the Venn diagram where readers of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” meet readers of John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces.”

Edward A. Novak III has had many professional lives, working in book publishing, consulting, higher education, the arts, and government regulatory oversight. He was born and baptized in southern California and raised in the San Francisco suburbs, where he faithfully served as an altar boy and attended Catholic schools. He lapsed in Washington DC at a Jesuit university. He has also lived in Chicago, New York, and two cities in Pennsylvania, Harrisburg and Camp Hill. He currently resides in Greenbelt, Maryland, and Tucson, Arizona.