Conduit

Conduit

$20.00

For Games Shepard it is increasingly apparent that there’s more to the world than meets the eye. Conduit tells the story of Games during a life-changing twenty-eighth year. He meets Rianna. He falls in love. He ends one job. He starts another. And throughout the year he struggles for purpose.

The story begins one cool January day with Games and Rianna on a mountain in western Massachusetts. The two have just met here for a memorial service. Games, a thoughtful, interior person, often thinks his way deeply into life, while Rianna lives to be of service to the world. January ends. February begins.

Following the twelve chapters of the Games and Rianna narrative, we meet twelve people, progressively younger, one for each month of the year. The first eleven of these people have recently died. Games’s interest in these people leads him to listen for their stories. He hears from each person a voice that seeks stronger connections – ultimately, a voice of courage and hope. And what Games learns in this foundational year also strengthens his relationship with Rianna. Conduit, however, does not end with the year. It remains to be seen whether what Games has learned will help with the rest of his life. Games cannot stop that people will die. Yet death, he knows, will never be the final word.

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Excerpt from CONDUIT

By Leif Garbisch

Standing, warm in his jacket in the chill winter air, Games played with the coins

in his pocket as he followed the stars. Change, change. Become who you are. He

knew he held something of value given to him, maybe earned by him, now his to

care for. Not money, of course, nothing material. A brightness in his being that had

been with him always yet he couldn’t say how. And not his alone. The brightness

really was very little to do with his personal life.

Each of Games’s thoughts led him to others. The connections took root as never

before, making trails like vines, like veins, filling every crevice with a network of life.

Games stood in this network as if for the first time. More likely he stood in the

mysterious presence of his origins. And say that this inner experience was a new

beginning for Games, that from now and from here, increasingly forever, life were to

flow through him like channeled water, as irrigation. Say he were to experience that

flow more and more each day, as the fullness of life and a need to release it. What

would he do, what could he do, to express what he felt, to convey such drink to a

much thirsting world?

KIRKUS REVIEW

A young man reflects on life and love in this novel from a veteran author.

Like many 27-year-olds, Games Shepard is not quite sure what he wants out of life

or what his purpose on Earth is. When Garbisch’s (The Shore, 2012, etc.) sprawling

story opens, Games is attending a mountaintop memorial service for a friend. There,

he meets Rianna, and the two embark on a tentative romance. As he and Rianna

negotiate the contours of their budding relationship, Games tries out different jobs

and ponders his choices. “I’m tired of all this aloneness I feel,” he muses early on.

Over 12 chapters, the author gives free rein to Games’ ruminations on life, which are

paired with stories from 12 people who the philosophically minded protagonist

encounters in his ramblings—and which are often more compelling than his own

prosaic adventures. Readers of a similar questioning bent will delight in following

his journey of self-discovery, though the less patient may be frustrated by the tale’s

sweeping, discursive style. References to literature, mythology, film, and psychology

abound. Two characters talk “Jungianly, reaching into symbols and the primitive

unconscious,” while another drops a mysterious box of books on Games’ doorstep,

accompanied by a note referencing a Yeats poem. Garbisch also delights in

wordplay, as characters repeatedly misunderstand one another’s meaning and

reflect on the similarity of certain terms and phrases: “I had a selfish purpose…I

wanted to bring the newcomer out of his shell. Selfish, shell—I seem to be playing

with words, but I’m not,” notes one. At times, these language games are amusing or

revealing, though they’re just as often distracting. Dialogue is written without

quotation marks; some readers may miss the punctuation marks, though their

absence works with the ambitious book’s stream-of-consciousness style. Garbisch

also has a keen eye for detail and the ability to find magic in the mundane, as when

Games and Rianna are described as “scattering playfulness like sunflower seeds

throughout their conversations.”

A complex book asks big questions and rewards those who are willing to go along

for the ride.

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