The Man Who Bought Back His Own Face

The Parable of the Wandering Millionaire and The Size of Grace

William Wordsworth, in "Tintern Abbey," praised the best portion of a good man's life as consisting not in grand deeds but in "little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love." Allen Levi's debut novel takes that line as a kind of secret motto. Its title character quotes it aloud, verbatim, to a local journalist two-thirds of the way through the book, and then, with a straight face that never once betrays the irony, spends four hundred pages demonstrating the precise opposite of what it claims to admire. There is nothing little about the kindnesses performed in Theo of Golden. They arrive by private jet, six-figure trust, forgiven debt, and a memorial service attended by international press. Nothing is nameless: every recipient, every secret, every act of largesse is itemized and remembered by name in an epilogue that reads uncannily like a will being read aloud, because in most of the ways that matter, that is exactly what it is. Levi wants his fable to wear the modest clothing of Wordsworth's line while operating at the scale of a foundation's annual report, and the friction between those two ambitions, small grace and large money, is the central and largely unexamined question the book never quite lets itself ask.

What is Theo of Golden attempting to do? Something old and something sincerely felt. It wants to tell the story of a Christlike stranger who arrives in an ordinary town, comes to love its people more truly than they love themselves, and departs, by dying, having quietly revealed both his history and theirs. The pattern is ancient: a god walks among mortals in disguise and rewards those who receive him with a hospitality he does not obviously require, a Portuguese Baucis and Philemon refitted for a Georgia river town with a coffee shop, a bookstore perpetually a week from closing, and a homeless woman on a bicycle she calls the Noble Invention. Does the novel succeed at this? As parable, more than a hardened reader expects; the sentimental machinery, however unsubtle, is operated by a writer who plainly believes every gear of it, and that unguarded sincerity does real work in places, work that irony could never manage. As a novel in the fuller sense, considerably less. It succeeds at the cost of nearly every discipline that distinguishes fiction from a sermon illustrated with characters, and it does not appear to know that any cost has been paid.

Why does it matter? Because self-published inspirational fiction of this kind, devotional in temperament, therapeutic in method, evangelical in its final appeal, constitutes a vast and commercially consequential literary culture that runs almost entirely beneath the notice of the review pages that might otherwise discipline it. A book like this will be given, not bought; passed hand to hand in church foyers and book clubs; loved without qualification by readers who will never once be asked, by anyone whose job it is to ask, whether the love is fully earned. That is precisely the condition under which a critic's attention is most useful, and most likely to be unwelcome.

The Bestowal as Unit of Measure

The book's basic structural unit, which its own characters name a "bestowal," is a fixed three-beat sequence repeated some five dozen times with only minor variation: the old man produces a stranger's portrait, asks a gently uncanny question that unlocks a confession the stranger did not intend to make, and then answers that confession with a gift calibrated to its wound. A grieving cellist receives a vintage instrument. A shamed accountant receives, in effect, permission to want the life she actually wants. A janitor receives a scholarship for his granddaughter. The pattern has the incantatory pull of litany, and Levi is shrewd enough to let its repetitions accumulate into something like a liturgy, each bestowal a station along a devotional path the reader is meant to walk with Theo. But litany is a poor engine for a four-hundred-page novel, because litany does not develop, it only repeats, and by the twentieth bestowal the reader can predict the shape of the twenty-first almost to the sentence: the recognition, the guarded deflection, the old man's gentle insistence, the confession, the tears, the gift. Character after character is distinguished chiefly by the flavor of the trauma assigned to fill the confession slot, which is a serious cost for a novel that wants, and largely earns in isolated moments, to be read as an act of genuine attention to particular lives.

The prose serves this liturgical intent at the expense of most others. Levi favors short, freestanding paragraphs, sometimes a single word, deployed for emphasis in a manner borrowed more from devotional writing and greeting-card verse than from the modern novel: "Floating. Sailing. Gathering mass and momentum." Dialogue is uniformly fluent regardless of who is speaking; a university-educated accountant, a homeless artisan, a ten-year-old girl, and an octogenarian recluse from the Douro Valley all articulate their interior lives in the same essayistic, faintly formal register, a leveling of voice that costs the book most of its social texture even as it serves the leveling theme, that all faces are equally worthy of love, the novel wants to enact. The narrator's omniscience is generous to a fault, routinely stepping forward to tell the reader how a scene will be remembered years later before the scene itself has finished happening, a device that trades suspense for a kind of retrospective, fireside-tale comfort. It is not an accident; it is the tone of a man telling you a story he already knows the ending of and wants you to trust him because of it. Whether that trust is worth the sacrifice of dramatic tension is the fair question the novel never stops to ask itself.

Baucis, Magwitch, Capra, and the Elderly Man from Portugal

The disguised benefactor is one of the oldest story patterns available to a writer, older than the novel by some three thousand years. Ovid gives it to us as Baucis and Philemon, the poor elderly couple who alone offer hospitality to two gods traveling incognito through Phrygia and are rewarded for it while their unwelcoming neighbors drown. The book of Genesis gives it to us at the oaks of Mamre, where Abraham entertains three strangers who turn out to carry divine authority, and the epistle to the Hebrews later coins the phrase for it directly: some have entertained angels unawares. Theoxeny, the technical name for this pattern, a god's visitation tested through hospitality, is the deep structural chassis on which Theo of Golden is built, whether or not its author would use that word for it, and recognizing the chassis explains a great deal about the novel's otherwise puzzling comfort with coincidence, foreknowledge, and moral simplicity. Fables built on theoxeny are not interested in probability. They are interested in the test.

The nearer and more immediately visible ancestor, however, is Dickens, whose fiction is so thoroughly populated with secret benefactors, Magwitch funding Pip's rise from beyond the reach of gratitude, the reformed Scrooge distributing anonymous geese and forgiven debts, that the mysterious rich stranger has become something close to an English-language genre convention in its own right. Levi's innovation, such as it is, lies in collapsing the two halves of the Dickensian formula, the secret giving and the eventual unmasking, into the giver's own lifetime and, more particularly, into a single elongated year, so that Theo gets to enjoy both the moral cleanliness of anonymous generosity and the emotional reward of being thanked for it before he dies. It is a shrewd narrative economy, and also, if one is being honest about it, a small evasion of the harder discipline Dickens himself more often practiced, in which the benefactor's satisfaction is deferred, incomplete, or denied altogether.

The nearest American cousin is Frank Capra's small-town redemption cinema, in which a single figure's moral clarity reorganizes an entire community's understanding of itself, and behind Capra stands the vast, largely unreviewed continent of American Christian-market inspirational fiction, devotional in temperament and evangelical in its final appeal, a publishing culture with real readers and real commercial weight that operates almost entirely outside the institutions, review pages, prize committees, university syllabi, that would otherwise discipline it. Levi's own biographical note, a Georgia attorney and judge, previously a singer-songwriter, publishing his debut through his own imprint from family acreage near a small town in middle Georgia, situates him squarely within that do-it-yourself devotional tradition. There is a pleasing symmetry, whether the author intended it or not, in the fact that a novel about a world-famous artist's preference for total obscurity should itself arrive from so genuinely obscure a source, distributed by exactly the modest, personal, un-corporate means its own hero would likely have approved of.

Megaloprepeia on the Promenade

Aristotle, in the fourth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, describes a virtue he calls megaloprepeia, usually translated as magnificence: the disposition of a wealthy man to spend greatly, and fittingly, on worthy and beautiful ends, a virtue with vulgar ostentation on one side of it and stinginess on the other. Theo, down to the detail of choosing portraits for their beauty and dispensing his fortune with exquisite tact rather than showy display, is close to a textbook illustration of the Aristotelian type, and the novel, whether or not its author has read a page of Aristotle, stages an unwitting treatise on the ethics of wealth well spent. This is, in fact, the most intellectually serious thing the book has going for it, and it is a pity the novel does not know enough to make the argument explicit, because megaloprepeia is a genuinely contested virtue, dependent on a static, settled aristocratic order that neither Aristotle's Athens nor Levi's Georgia can any longer take entirely for granted.

A second and less flattering frame comes from Marcel Mauss's anthropology of the gift, which observed that gifts in every studied society create obligation; there is no such thing, structurally, as a purely unilateral present, only presents that disguise their reciprocal demands more or less successfully. Levi stages every bestowal as pure grace, freely given and expecting nothing, but the text itself quietly betrays the Maussian truth underneath: recipients are transformed by gratitude into more obedient, more grateful, more morally improved versions of themselves, precisely the behavioral yield a gift is designed, consciously or not, to extract. The novel wants unilateral grace and receives, structurally, a very well-mannered transaction. A third frame, drawn from Emmanuel Levinas, fits the book's own central image with startling precision: Levinas argued that the face of the Other issues an ethical summons prior to any calculation of reciprocity, that we are answerable to a face before we have decided whether we wish to be. Theo enacts this claim almost too literally, purchasing actual faces off a coffee shop wall in answer to a summons he insists he cannot fully explain, a coincidence of philosophy and plot device that elevates, for a moment, the novel's most naive gesture into its most genuinely interesting one.

The theological question the funeral sermon raises outright, whether Theo is meant to be read as a figure of Christ, deserves to be taken as seriously as the text asks it to be taken, and taken seriously, it reveals the book's deepest structural problem. A Christ-figure whose grace is always liquid, always traceable to an estate, always cashable into tuition or trust funds, risks collapsing the very point such figures traditionally exist to make: that grace is unmerited and non-transactional, given to those who could not possibly repay it in kind. Theo's generosity, for all its warmth, is never non-transactional in that sense; it is simply very, very well funded. Grace with a checking account behind it is not less generous than grace with nothing behind it, but it is a philosophically different thing, and the novel, so fluent elsewhere in its Christian vocabulary, never quite reckons with the difference.

The Convenience of Being Chosen

The first and most consequential blind spot is the novel's unexamined faith in money as solvent. Nearly every wound the book takes seriously, a shamed pregnancy, a busker's injured hand, an underpaid custodian's family, a bookstore's chronic insolvency, is healed or substantially eased by direct transfer of wealth or influence. The epilogue, to its quiet credit, admits that the miracle was local and temporary: the bookstore is, fifteen years running, still a week from closing; the coffee shop now needs a "seasoned team" of hired staff where friendship once sufficed. But the novel does not let that admission trouble its own theology. It never asks what becomes of a town's structural poverty once its single, mortal, spectacularly wealthy angel has died and gone to be buried beside his daughter in France.

The second is a coincidence density that a fable can carry and a novel asking for realist emotional investment cannot. That the coffee shop's portraitist turns out to be the narrator's own unacknowledged son; that the sad-eyed accountant turns out to be the daughter of his old antagonist; that the homeless cyclist becomes, of all the town's residents, the estate's final new client, these are theoxeny's traditional excesses, license granted to myth, and the book wants that license while simultaneously asking to be read with the earned, granular feeling of psychological realism. It cannot fully have both, and mostly it does not notice it is trying to.

The third concerns whom the novel grants interiority. Ellen, unhoused and living beneath the fountain the town calls the Fedder, is rhetorically declared "capable of saintliness" by nearly every character who meets her, yet her suffering is rendered mostly through affectionate ornament, a nicknamed bicycle, an artisan featherwood craft sold as redemption, rather than through the same granular psychological attention lavished on the middle-class accountant or the aspiring academic busker. The poor in this novel are loved, effusively and sincerely, but they are loved from a slight and telling distance the wealthier characters are never made to keep.

The fourth is rhetorical monotony. Anaphora, "to everyone else... to us...", and stacked rhetorical questions recur so often, voiced by Theo, by the funeral priest, by the omniscient narrator alike, that they stop reading as the idiolects of distinct people and start reading as a single authorial sermon delivered through six different mouths. And the fifth is a mystery introduced and then simply abandoned: an attack near the novel's close leaves two characters injured, and the epilogue notes, almost as an aside, that "the assailants were never identified or prosecuted." A novel this at ease with mystery as atmosphere is considerably less at ease with mystery as unresolved fact, and the dropped thread reads less like ambiguity chosen than like a plot obligation quietly declined.

What Levi Genuinely Achieves

It would be a lesser critic's error to let the ledger of complaint above obscure what the novel does honestly well. The withheld obituary remains a genuine structural achievement, built and paid off with real patience across several hundred pages, the kind of long-form discipline that self-published fiction is often, unfairly but not always inaccurately, assumed to lack. The book's final movement, two letters discovered together, one from Theo to the son he never publicly claimed, one from that son's mother returning a keepsake she calls the Evening of Biscopo, achieves briefly and without strain the specificity the rest of the novel too often reaches for through abstraction. A heart-shaped opal, a field above a cliff, a canvas inscribed on its back with a single unadorned sentence: these are the kind of concrete, particular details, an objective correlative in the oldest critical sense, that the book's more generalized talk of radiance and blessedness cannot match, and their appearance so late suggests a writer capable of considerably more restraint than he mostly permits himself.

Whether by design or by fortunate erudition, the choice of the name Theo, short for Theophilus, "friend of God" or "beloved of God," and the very name to which Luke addresses both his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, rewards a reader alert enough to notice it. A novel built from some sixty short, parable-shaped episodes, addressed in spirit if not in fact to a reader it hopes to convince of a stranger's essential goodness, bearing the name of the man Luke wrote his own Gospel to persuade: if intentional, it is a genuinely elegant piece of structural wit; if accidental, it is the kind of happy accident that only visits writers steeped, even unconsciously, in the material they are drawing on.

Levi's affection for his invented Georgia town is unpretentious and specific in a way that many more technically accomplished novels cannot claim: the bus route numbered with the particularity of a man who has actually ridden one, a district called the Boughery, a fountain nicknamed the Fedder after a child's mispronunciation, the small, load-bearing textures of a place someone has genuinely lived beside rather than researched. And the book's insistence on unfashionable virtues, patient attention, hospitality to strangers, sincerity offered without the armor of irony, is itself, in a literary culture that so often rewards the opposite instincts, a species of quiet courage worth crediting even where the execution falls short of the ambition.

On the Pain in the Portraits Theo Didn't Paint. Is He a Good Man?

It is instructive to set Theo of Golden beside the two writers whose material it most nearly shares and whose company reveals, more clearly than any list of complaints could, the road the novel chose not to take. Marilynne Robinson's Gilead gives us another elderly man writing, near the end of his life, of light and mortality and a son he loves imperfectly, and achieves in a single unhurried voice what Levi's sixty bestowals attempt to achieve through sheer accumulation: the sense of a soul genuinely, slowly, unshowily examined. Flannery O'Connor, working the same Georgia soil Levi farms, understood grace as something that arrives violently, ambiguously, often at the point of a gun or a bull's horn, redemption that costs the recipient something real and does not always look, in the moment, like redemption at all. Levi's grace, by contrast, arrives with a checkbook and a kind word, and never once draws blood. Judged against Robinson or O'Connor, the novel is, frankly, outmatched. Judged against its truer genre-siblings, O. Henry's sentimental Christmas parables and Capra's civic fables of small-town moral repair, it acquits itself with more dignity than a jaded critic expects walking in.

But the most interesting thing about this novel may be a thing it never says out loud. Theo spends the entire book buying back portraits he did not paint, of people he did not create, and then asking each subject to tell him the true, hidden story behind a face an artist already rendered without their full consent. He decides, on the strength of a stranger's eyes, that there is "strength" here, "sadness" there, and is proven, bestowal after bestowal, uncannily correct. This is not merely the behavior of a benefactor. It is, with only the thinnest disguise, the behavior of a novelist: a figure who moves through a town purchasing the rights to strangers' pain, deciding what that pain means, and handing it back to its owner wrapped, quite literally in this case, in paper and a bow. Allen Levi has written, whether he intended to or not, a novel about what an author does to the people he claims to love on the page. He takes their faces down from the wall. He decides what the sadness in their eyes is really about. And he returns it to them, transformed, as a gift they are given no real opportunity to refuse.

Whether that transaction, performed here with evident tenderness and the very best of intentions, deserves to be called grace, or something closer to a beautifully mannered form of appropriation, is a harder and more unsettling question than the one the novel spends four hundred pages answering, which is merely whether Theo is a good man. He is, by the book's own generous accounting, unquestionably good. The reader finishes uncertain, all the same, whether to thank the author for the portrait he has drawn of them, or to ask him, gently, to put the face back on the wall and let its owner decide, for once, unprompted, what her own sadness is trying to say.