The Dilemma of a Seeker
by August Reyner
Corin has spent ten years looking for the one certain thing that everything else could stand on. Every answer he finds gives way to a further question, and while he has been looking, his life has gone on without him: a house he has never finished, and Mira, who has stopped asking when the walls will be plastered and started making plans of her own.
Then he crosses the quarry road to the house at the top of it, where an old man the town will not talk about has lived alone for thirty years.
Ansel says he found what Corin is looking for. He says he can pass it on. And he says Corin should understand the price first, because whatever a thing like that costs to hold, it costs the same to be given: you will sit at your brother's table for the rest of your life, and love the people at it, and never once be able to say the thing you know.
Corin stays.
What follows is more than a year on that hill. An old man walks a young one out along his own reasoning until the ground goes out from under it. A woman finishes a house without waiting. A stranger in a town down the coast, who took the same thing fifteen years ago, tells Corin precisely what it did to her. And in a box in a cold back room are four hundred letters an old man wrote to his daughter and never sent.
Then Ansel begins to die, and Corin has until the winter to decide what he is willing to pay.
For readers of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and John Williams's Stoner.
The Dilemma of a Seeker is August Reyner's first novel.