Chances are that you might not have heard of Jonathan Carroll. If that's the case, then today is your lucky day.
Neil Gaiman describes Carroll's latest novel, "Mr. Breakfast," as "a beautiful, brilliant, meditation on art, love, inspiration and what makes life worthwhile."
The book is about a failing comedian named Graham Patterson. On a cross-country drive, he decides to get a tattoo. The tattoo artist not only gives Graham a one-of-a-kind tattoo, she also gives him a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
The tattoo artist tells Graham that his lost soul can jump between three different universes. Through these experiences, he will find some combination of love, fame and fatherhood. Jonathan gives us insight into what it would be like to live a different life.
"I have always been fascinated with the life not lived, whether in real life, or in literature," Carroll told Wisconsin Public Radio's "BETA."
"There are so many wonderful versions of it, from Borges to the film 'Sliding Doors.' And I think it's one of the universal questions that we ask, along the lines of why am I here? Or is there a god? The question is, what would my life be like if I had gone left instead of right? Or I'd taken that job or hadn't taken that job? Those possibilities that you had in life that you chose to go in one direction rather than the other," he continued.
Graham ends up at the tattoo parlor because his car breaks down. He walks past the shop and becomes fascinated with the artwork in the window.
"And he has the tattoo artist show him a book of her tattoos and he chooses one, and it turns out that it's very magical," Carroll said. "It allows him to see the three lives that he could live at this moment — the one that he's living, the one where his dream comes true. And the third one is a kind of domestic life with family and children."
"And the tattoo artist, the bringer of the magic, says: 'You can watch this, but you can't participate in it.' So basically, he can observe these three lives and then he has three chances to go back to each of them," Carroll explained. "And then at the end of those three chances, or even earlier, he has to choose. And then after he chooses it, his memory will be wiped of this experience, and he'll just be Graham Patterson living in a normal life."
In Carroll's case, he's not completely sure what he'd do if he was offered the same deal in "Mr. Breakfast."
"My wife asked me the other day, 'If you couldn't be a writer, what would you be?' And I said, 'I'm a musician,'" he said. "I've been married 50 years. And she looked at me like she'd never seen this guy before. She said, 'A musician'?' And I said, 'Yeah, I'd like to be one of those guys who's a piano bar player.'"
One of the most profound passages in "Mr. Breakfast" is: "We all live in our past sometimes. Our memories become our present. Any life is a past, present, and future, not just a series of right nows."
This theme is crucial to what makes the novel such a beautiful and thoughtful book. Carroll said we spend too much time living in the past and worrying about the future, forgetting the present.
"I think that too often we live in our past or in our future and forget they ain't happening, but your now is," he said.
"And I think that it causes a lot of problems and a lot of heartache, because if you live in your future right now, it's unimportant — because tomorrow, the good stuff happens. If you live in your past, the bad stuff kind of carries you like a dark cloud over you into the present. So if you're still hating that lover from 20 years ago, that has an effect on right now — and a big effect. It means that you're kind of preoccupied with something. You can do nothing to fix it. It's fixed. There it is. That happened. And whereas the future is an abstract. Why play with something that's abstract when there's the concrete right now?"