Ambition and Integrity in America: How four students, a teacher, and a dead guy reconsidered greatness and restored American integrity

This gentle satire of a fictional America, Ohio, recounts the story of four resolute high school sophomores at Dry Springs High School, which offers a dispiritingly standardized education administered by flaccid leaders like Principal Clay Putty and Literature Department Head Karl Shite. By default, the kids must chart their own course to a “successful” adulthood, usually in subconscious imitation of their weary and confused parents. Christian Loutly follows the beliefs of his parents and The Church of Sacred Southern Sanctimony, but is torn between the hold of authoritarian dogma and the misgivings of his own intellect. Taliba Darwina Seekheart follows her biologist mother in her conviction that scientific thinking and utilitarian choices are the proper path to a good life, but her own romantic passion for music pull her in a different direction. Ernest Adam Seems is driven to follow his rich father’s desire to establish a dynasty of wealth and power, but the boy is restrained by a confusing concern for honor and right. And then there’s Chip Holman, who demands to be called merely Holman. Holman is fiercely independent; he charts his own course. He lives with his foster parents, but he follows no one. Holman needs no one, but he needs love: not to be loved, but to love. A chance tragedy brings a new teacher to Dry Springs High–a broken, cynical man, a failed professor of Classics at Yale, Frank Kaput. In time Kaput is moved to introduce the four students to an ancient book about a promising young man 2400 years ago who also sought a successful life and about an older man who helped him examine and reconceive his ideas of success and the good life. As Kaput and the kids think through the old book, their own reasoning compels them to challenge many of the ideas they grew up with, and they gradually discover that for all their differences, they are united in a critical fundamental commitment to truth and reason. Their new commitment to questioning and thinking begins to displace aimless conformity to mandated curricula and draw more and more students into serious and difficult self-examination and challenging of the status quo. As honesty and determination grow in America, the profound damage of long neglect emerges: America is being poisoned by vile pollution, and the kids must risk everything to stop the poison.