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Ryan, Mitchell

O'Reilly Media, Incorporated

Fall of a Sparrow

<p>But they were dead, and he still had a chance to live. It was years since he had gone from one great part to the next, but life had merely...shifted. Why couldn't he accept this? He was an actor, plain and simple: "an abstract and brief chronicle of the time." He had always done his job. By now he'd spent more time in Hollywood than in New York and had done more films than plays. Susan was right, he had been lucky, blessed even, to have had a chance to do the work he'd done. True, his life on the stage was gone, "melted into thin air," and would never come back, the way of things and something to be faced. Whether he was in a play or film or soap opera or now a sitcom, he would just do the best he knew how. He was an actor, and an actor acts. As he looked out to the brilliant green sea and up to the sky he glowed with contentment that, somehow, he was able also to accommodate the melancholy that would always be part of him. A seagull glided by on the wind right in front of him, and he heard the voice of his first teacher, Doug Ramey, across the years: "The only thing that counts is the work. As with life, it's a process, and nothing matters but the doing."</p>

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Page Publishing

<p>The year 1865 finds Edward behind the lines during the Civil War, where he finds his fatally wounded brother and watches him die, then buries him in the new land.\nEdward is the owner of a bar and gambling hall in Ohio 1882. An ambitious man, he takes the opportunity to enter politics in Cincinnati. He must give up the woman he has been keeping, for she will taint his new life.\nNow in 1899, in a loveless marriage to the daughter of a political boss, he banks everything on a mayoral campaign and loses. The birth of his second son, Charles, only serves to further trap him in despair.\nCharles's story begins in 1917. He is eighteen years old and studying his heart's desire at the Art Institute of Chicago. He is called home by his father, Edward, to serve with his brother and enlist in the Army in World War I. He cannot be protected by his deeply upset mother. He goes to war, giving up his dream of being a painter.\nIn 1925, Charles is a reporter working for a daily newspaper in Chicago doing a story about bootleggers. On an impulse, he goes to visit the art school that he left years ago. He receives a phone call that his father has died and goes home to Louisville. While there, he reads that his reporter partner has been murdered by the gangsters they were investigating. Charles breaks down and is comforted by his brother's wife, Molly, with whom he has always been in love.\nEight years later, in the middle of the Depression, Charles is penniless and out of work and is seeking the haven and warmth of the local library. He falls in love with Genevieve, a retiring young woman who is flattered by his attention. He sees her off to her family for Christmas. Then after visiting the whore whom he sees occasionally, he decides that he must change his luck, change his life, and marry.\nIn 1939, Charles is a salesman in Louisville. He is married now with two children who are strangers to him. The city is under a plague of starlings. He feeds birds from his office window then goes to a museum, where he often escapes, to see a Vermeer.\nHe talks with Natalie, the curator who has befriended him, and is unsettled by how much of himself he reveals. Unused to the intimacy, he gets drunk and finds that the police are shooting the starlings.\nSickened by the slaughter, he goes home and begs forgiveness of Genevieve.</p>

A Special Providence

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

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Books by Ryan, Mitchell