Synopsis
Suppose that the most famous line of the Declaration of Independence, "All men are created equal," was not actually first written by Thomas Jefferson but was part of a Charter of a French Privateer, Black Caesar, an escaped slave from an island in the Louisiana Territory.Now suppose you are the academic who is helping the person who discovered this fact. In contemporary USA, the news might not be eagerly received by a public that thinks "multicultural" is synonymous with un-American.These Truths shifts back and forth in time, mostly following the trials of Gil Sykes, an English professor whose colleague has found the Charter in the ruins of a villa in Haiti. The resulting furor results in nothing but trouble for the pair as they are punished, especially by their respective institutions, for publishing the truth.While touching on historical issues of slavery, this novel also deals with contemporary issues of race, sexual harassment, intimidation, and conservative political correctness.
Review
In These Truths, Joe Zeppetello provides a sardonic take on this day and age of 24-hour news cycles and endless spin,skillfully weaving a tale of the hue and outcry that might result from a startling revelation about one of the Founding Fathers - a perfect storm that very nearly ruins the lives of the researchers who uncover the truth. - Howard Massey,author of Roadie, The Great British Recording Studios, and co-author of Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick's memoir Here, There and Everywhere.
If you're going to write a novel about people grappling with hard truths, you'd best have Joe Zeppetello's humility. He never gets in the way of this gripping, driven tale of the many faces of piracy. Here are people, unlike millions of Americans,hell-bent on truth, and their stories sound as if they voted for Joe Zeppetello tell them. -- Djelloul Marbrook, critically acclaimed poet and prose writer,and author of several collections of poetry, novels, and novellas, including The Seas are Dolphins' Tears.
For those of us who have not been paying sufficient attention, the past few years have witnessed a less than subtle entry into the age of New Speak, which is a roundabout way of saying that truth and reality as we once knew them have been totally subjectivized to the point where they serve not as reference points for understanding the present and past but merely as something to be manipulated, more often than not for nefarious ends. Thus the title of Joe Zeppetello's latest work, These Truths, references something well beyond a certain fragment of Thomas Jefferson's most recognizable words. As such, These Truths is less a novel about the fallout from a controversial historical discovery - that Jefferson may have appropriated his most famous passage from another source - than an exploration of the current epistemological dilemma: how one knows what one knows or more to the point how alleged "truths" are manipulated to suit extremely personal and often ugly ends. Thus, it is not Jefferson but Gilbert Sykes'personal Odyssey that is the real focus of the book: how a middle-aged academic finds himself sucked into a proverbial black hole where reality is distorted the way intense gravitational fields apparently bend light and time. Merely a co-author of what starts out as an obscure academic article, Sykes finds himself not only excoriated by the conservative press but equally the object of attacks from his own colleagues, some using his weakened position to advance their own ends even to the point where he is knowingly falsely accused of sexually assaulting an under-aged student. Thus, a simple academic act thrusts Sykes into his own private Inferno though unlike Dante he is not merely an outside observer and chronicler but an object trapped in a contemporary reality where an individual's worth is reduced to his/her entertainment value in a world where truth, in the ultimate sense of the word, has become fungible, at best.
David Gawarecki is a retired Adjunct Lecturer in English a swell as a poet, writer, sculptor, and tennis player.
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