Joshua John Timpko

He Sat In The Rumble Seat Joshua John Timpko

Abel Dean Hart is a young author who has just learned that his father, whom he hasn't seen in over six years, is dying. Their relationship is strained, to say the least, and Abel sees this newfound illness as an opportunity. He always wondered what it was that made his father the failure that Abel sees him as. Was it the alcohol, the painkillers, his obsession with the crumbling bar that his father built from the ground up? Was it genetics? Heredity? Is his father's downfall something that can be traced back in the blood that they share? If so, this worries Abel more than anything. The word "addiction" hangs over him like an albatross. He flies back to his hometown of Delmar, Iowa with his longtime girlfriend, Carin, in search of these answers and in search of the plot for his next novel; the one about his own father. He grapples with the perils of aging, relationships, love, sex in his twenties, with artistic integrity, romance, with his new life as a faux-intellectual in New York City, with what it means to create honest art, with objectivity, and the fear of when his own blood is finally going to creep up on him and attack. "We're all addicted to something," his brother, Peter, says to him as Abel continues running from that something that was inside him all along. Will Abel be willing to confront these things head on? Will he be willing to forgive his father for his pitfalls? Will he finally stop running, and regain agency? Will he take responsibility for his actions or simply deny that he had a choice to begin with? All of this is tackled, across time and space, from the mind of an anxious young man in Joshua Timpko's debut novel, He Sat In The Rumble Seat.