Interrupting the Present with Brian Platzer

Brian Platzer’s The Optimists is narrated by Rod Keating, a man who has suffered a stroke, telling the story of an extraordinary student named Clara, despite his limitations of speech and movement. But Clara reaches us through the meanderings of his own consciousness, and his past continues to live within his present. The story that we get is one that experiments with the conditions of telling: the way memory loops forward and backward, and the fact that we can never fully describe another person without also describing ourselves.

“The Optimists is a book narrated by a man at the end of his life trying to entertain the reader best he can.”—Brian Platzer

The origin of the novel is direct. Brian’s eighth-grade English teacher, Rod Keating, stayed in his life long after the classroom. They taught together and developed a close friendship that spanned decades. Then, a week after officiating Brian’s wedding, Keating suffered a massive stroke. He lost the ability to speak or use his body. Brian continued to visit him, reading aloud, talking through his life, and sitting with the fact that there would be no response.

See the full interview on Substack!