Gabriel Brownstein can’t seem to stay behind the podium. He shifts his weight back and forth on the balls of his feet; he shuffles with sections of his manuscript, then looks up to the audience, wide-eyed, and grins. He’s not used to being watched. He seems nervous but friendly, giddy but perhaps uncertain. He’s about to read from his new book—a novel—that hasn’t even been published. Perhaps he hasn’t read it out loud before, except to himself. People fidget in their seats. Teachers and students edge forward, waiting. A professor leans back in her chair, folding her arms. A girl takes a sip from her soda. The author begins to give background information for the book, but he’s rambling. Perhaps he’s remembering what it was like to be a student here, waiting for someone to begin to lecture, perhaps even in this exact room. He lifts the paper and begins to read.

“Sir Arthur Conan Doyle sprawls in a beach chair. His chest and belly bulge...”

Gabriel Brownstein graduated from Oberlin in 1988. Too vain to acknowledge the existence of other writers within the classroom and too shy to apply for any Creative Writing classes until his senior year, “Gabe” majored in English. He was invited back to Oberlin to read excerpts from his upcoming novel, The Man from Beyond, in a reading sponsored by the Creative Writing Department last Monday.

As he reads, he begins to move about more, until eventually he isn’t behind the podium at all but to the left of it, one foot staggered in front of the other, leaning into the pages as he reads. He swings his left arm up and down in the air, sometimes in a light fist or grasping motion, accentuating each word, each syllable with this dramatic animation of his hand. His eyes grow large and his voice climes in volume and any previous nervousness has been transformed into raw energy, an intense enthusiasm for the words, places and characters that have sprung from his imagination.

I gradually become aware of the sounds of his words, the cacophony or euphony of each phrase, each juxtaposition of vowels and consonants. His sentences are rich and complex, slippery and magical. They clack and clang, whoosh and whisper, thump and ring. A few sentences carry on until Brownstein seems trip on the obstacles he’s set before himself, but mostly they enchant, engage and entice the audience.

Brownstein tells his audience that writing is hard. Everyone, he says, assumes that you’re wasting your time. It isn’t something that people aspire to do for money or fame, but more of a habit that’s impossible to quit. Before he was published, he would always choose day jobs that would allow him enough time in the mornings to write. After Oberlin, Brownstein attended the Creative Writing Graduate program at Columbia. He noted that workshops have their negative and positive aspects, but lamented that he had to unlearn many of the techniques he acquired from workshop writing.

Brownstein’s first book, a collection of short stories titled The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W won the 2002 Hemingway Foundation/PEN-New England Award for a Distinguished First Work of Fiction by an American Author. His newest novel starts out following the lives of Harry Houdini, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his family and mysterious medium named Margery as their lives intersect. After a few chapters he steps back from the historical and focuses on a fictitious young journalist named Molly Goodman, who has been writing tabloid articles concerning the larger-than-life figures Hodini and Doyle. From his reading, the book’s plot appears intriguing and complex, and seems to resonate on both a personal and a fantastic level.

“The Man Beyond” will make its way to bookstores in spring of 2005.