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briandice's review
5.0
While reading this novel it occured to me on more than one occasion that I was very happy that this wasn't the first Coover book I'd read. This work is so very different than his fairy tale making-and-breaking works that require new maps to navigate his fictional terrain; The Origin of the Brunists is a story told in a Coover voice unfamiliar taking those other works into account - and yet charged with enough voltage to remind the reader that everything here is third rail. By the last 20 pages of the novel I wasn't sure which of us was donning the dynamite laden vest. This book eviscerated everything Americana with such scalpel precision it seemed that there was no option other than the hair trigger detonator tripping and taking everything with it - reader, author, American culture and any second act. That Coover continued on after its publication in 1966 to write more novels - and then return to the subject matter to publish a 1,000+ page sequel 48 years later is an achievement so monumental it is difficult for me to really comprehend, having now finished the first book and being so affected by it.
Such an important book. A shame that here on GR it has less than 300 reads. I cannot recommend it strongly enough.
Such an important book. A shame that here on GR it has less than 300 reads. I cannot recommend it strongly enough.
blackoxford's review
5.0
Left Behind
It was Grace that taught my heart to fear
And Grace my fear relieved-
The town of West Condon, “a mote on the fat belly of the American prairie,” like grace, is inescapable. It, like God, “is utterly remote from anything human.” The place traps its inhabitants, mainly underground, with no hope except in either religion or beer. Located in the approximate centre of the continent, the place is America in microcosm: a country of continuous competitive tension with one’s neighbors, one’s colleagues, often one’s family members, to survive - psychologically as well as physically. In youth, there is high school basketball and its compulsory competitive rituals which create common tribal lore and a minimal shared history. In adulthood, there is only the mine, a dark purgatorial realm in which status and power have nothing to do with the lessons of youth. The competition there is deadly real and unrelenting in ways never prepared for above ground. The men who go down the pits, and their families, live two parallel lives, one superficially conventional, the other hidden and mostly hideous.
The competition and alienation between the worlds defined by religion/beer and above/below are maintained until communal disaster - an explosion in Deepwater Number 9 - overcomes the American ideology of social independence, male machismo, and individual responsibility. Then the world becomes both sentimentally emotional and apocalyptically spiritual at a stroke. Mass death causes a halt in normal relationships. Acute feelings of vulnerability become common currency. The bars and the churches are the primary beneficiaries, where the currency gets spent. Grief and existential angst are mitigated in one; portents of the Second Coming are joyously anticipated in the other. Christian fundamentalists, psychics, numerologists, Tarot readers, spiritualists, gnostic pessimists and mystical optimists (but not Islamists, being unknown at that time in that place) unite against the demonic forces of ignorant indifference. Disaster, paradoxically, revives the American Dream of universal (or at least white), unlimited (or at least relative) salvation.
These are people “with sweeping world views that made cosmic events out of a casual gesture or a cloud’s idle passage.” Their response to collective tragedy is part of the legacy of pioneers in the American wilderness. The mine itself is a concrete reminder of the long-lost wilderness in its attractiveness to immigrants whose sons and daughters populate the place. Even more, the mine remains as wild, as volatile, and as unpredictable as the weather. The impending violence of the coal face is the frontier extended underground. It has an overwhelming power beyond their control that rules their lives. The mine is an avatar of the Old Testament Yahweh - arbitrary, decisive, and subject to no appeal. It is only right therefore that these people worry since “worry is the universal dread tempered by hope.”
But the commonality of worry does not imply a sharing of worry. Each West Condoner is on his own. The Italians, the Germans, the Slovaks, the Spanish, the Catholics, the Baptists consider each other inimical. Every group has its own racism, cults and loyalties; these are necessary for psychic as well as physical survival. Without them there is no protection from the Other. But when “God’s fist had closed on the mine-hive and shook it.” there is at least a show of community, of pulling together, a suspension of the tribal mistrust which lies just below the surface of American civility. The eponymous Bruno, raised from the dead after three days in the nether world and presiding over the establishment of his church a Pentecostal seven weeks later, is neither spiritual nor a competent mine worker. But he is close enough to being Christ (or, this is America after all, an alien from some other dimension) to serve as a symbol of solidarity... and of course as scapegoat.
The intersection of the saints and sinners in West Condon is Miller, the owner of the failing town’s failing newspaper. All he sees in Bruno is “a browbeaten child turned ego-centered adult psychopath.” Miller had escaped - to university, to the city, to a society of change - but was lured back by a big fish in small pond ‘opportunity.’ He has to remain civil with everyone to do his job, but his dual nationality, as it were, means that no one trusts him entirely. As the maker and breaker of self-images, as well as reputations, he has power. Miller is a game-player. He knows that all news is fake news to somebody - the mine owners, the wire service reporters, the local religious enthusiasts, the drunks and petty politicians. Reality is whatever spin he decides to create. All fear this power; but all feed it, hoping to share in it.
This makes Miller as trapped as anyone else. He belongs. People listen to his views. His identity has become what has been given to him by his fellow-citizens. And, because of his job and experience, he is the link to the rest of the world, a short of Charon who patrols the River Styx, attracting the attention of the world at large to this insular and debilitating place, and carrying it external views of itself. He becomes a political figure when he inadvertently creates a coalition of the saved and the damned and represents it to the world. The power of fake news.
I am surprised that I have found no one in literary circles who has twigged to the parallels with the rise of Donald Trump. If my guess is correct, the cultural conditions that Coover intuited in the 1960’s are precisely those that led 60 years later to the rise of the Deplorables - the largely uneducated ex-urban population, serving in fast-food peonage, inheritors of bad genes and worse teeth, hooked on booze or oxycodone, and one paycheck from utter penury - as a political force in the land. Coover saw the potential connection between the Evangelicals and this dis-enfranchised under-class: The New Heartland with deep roots in the settlement of the continent. The narrative doesn’t write itself, but when it does get written it is responded to enthusiastically.
The connection among the disparate inhabitants of this heartland is, of course, the extreme tendency to believe one’s own press as the only one that isn’t fake: “their canonical faith in their own private ways to truth.” In other political systems religious enthusiasts form minority parties, allowing participation in coalition governments. This is infeasible in America. Elsewhere in the world, the working poor might join communist or socialist parties. In America this is not an option. But the discovery of their commonality, essentially their insistence on the partiality and corruption of ‘the system,’ gives them, the immoderately pious and those left behind in the progress of capitalism, formidable political power. Each faction in this coalition recognises the irrationality of its alliance with the others. But as so many have pointed out during the era of Trumpism, ‘they don’t care.’ Messianism has never been a rational undertaking; and neither has popular insurrection.
It seems to me that Coover has continued the tradition of Theodore Dreiser and John dos Passos, among others, who understood the dynamics of discontent and resentment inherent in American society. The myth of an unlimited future - economic, political, sociological - inhibited taking this discontent and resentment seriously. Essentially that myth has now been debunked. The future looks as grim as the present. Call it the End Times or Revolution, religious ideology combined with economic desperation packs a punch. And the punch destroys much of current society. But ‘They don’t care.’ They have grace. God is with them. They are “victims of transcendence.”
It was Grace that taught my heart to fear
And Grace my fear relieved-
The town of West Condon, “a mote on the fat belly of the American prairie,” like grace, is inescapable. It, like God, “is utterly remote from anything human.” The place traps its inhabitants, mainly underground, with no hope except in either religion or beer. Located in the approximate centre of the continent, the place is America in microcosm: a country of continuous competitive tension with one’s neighbors, one’s colleagues, often one’s family members, to survive - psychologically as well as physically. In youth, there is high school basketball and its compulsory competitive rituals which create common tribal lore and a minimal shared history. In adulthood, there is only the mine, a dark purgatorial realm in which status and power have nothing to do with the lessons of youth. The competition there is deadly real and unrelenting in ways never prepared for above ground. The men who go down the pits, and their families, live two parallel lives, one superficially conventional, the other hidden and mostly hideous.
The competition and alienation between the worlds defined by religion/beer and above/below are maintained until communal disaster - an explosion in Deepwater Number 9 - overcomes the American ideology of social independence, male machismo, and individual responsibility. Then the world becomes both sentimentally emotional and apocalyptically spiritual at a stroke. Mass death causes a halt in normal relationships. Acute feelings of vulnerability become common currency. The bars and the churches are the primary beneficiaries, where the currency gets spent. Grief and existential angst are mitigated in one; portents of the Second Coming are joyously anticipated in the other. Christian fundamentalists, psychics, numerologists, Tarot readers, spiritualists, gnostic pessimists and mystical optimists (but not Islamists, being unknown at that time in that place) unite against the demonic forces of ignorant indifference. Disaster, paradoxically, revives the American Dream of universal (or at least white), unlimited (or at least relative) salvation.
These are people “with sweeping world views that made cosmic events out of a casual gesture or a cloud’s idle passage.” Their response to collective tragedy is part of the legacy of pioneers in the American wilderness. The mine itself is a concrete reminder of the long-lost wilderness in its attractiveness to immigrants whose sons and daughters populate the place. Even more, the mine remains as wild, as volatile, and as unpredictable as the weather. The impending violence of the coal face is the frontier extended underground. It has an overwhelming power beyond their control that rules their lives. The mine is an avatar of the Old Testament Yahweh - arbitrary, decisive, and subject to no appeal. It is only right therefore that these people worry since “worry is the universal dread tempered by hope.”
But the commonality of worry does not imply a sharing of worry. Each West Condoner is on his own. The Italians, the Germans, the Slovaks, the Spanish, the Catholics, the Baptists consider each other inimical. Every group has its own racism, cults and loyalties; these are necessary for psychic as well as physical survival. Without them there is no protection from the Other. But when “God’s fist had closed on the mine-hive and shook it.” there is at least a show of community, of pulling together, a suspension of the tribal mistrust which lies just below the surface of American civility. The eponymous Bruno, raised from the dead after three days in the nether world and presiding over the establishment of his church a Pentecostal seven weeks later, is neither spiritual nor a competent mine worker. But he is close enough to being Christ (or, this is America after all, an alien from some other dimension) to serve as a symbol of solidarity... and of course as scapegoat.
The intersection of the saints and sinners in West Condon is Miller, the owner of the failing town’s failing newspaper. All he sees in Bruno is “a browbeaten child turned ego-centered adult psychopath.” Miller had escaped - to university, to the city, to a society of change - but was lured back by a big fish in small pond ‘opportunity.’ He has to remain civil with everyone to do his job, but his dual nationality, as it were, means that no one trusts him entirely. As the maker and breaker of self-images, as well as reputations, he has power. Miller is a game-player. He knows that all news is fake news to somebody - the mine owners, the wire service reporters, the local religious enthusiasts, the drunks and petty politicians. Reality is whatever spin he decides to create. All fear this power; but all feed it, hoping to share in it.
This makes Miller as trapped as anyone else. He belongs. People listen to his views. His identity has become what has been given to him by his fellow-citizens. And, because of his job and experience, he is the link to the rest of the world, a short of Charon who patrols the River Styx, attracting the attention of the world at large to this insular and debilitating place, and carrying it external views of itself. He becomes a political figure when he inadvertently creates a coalition of the saved and the damned and represents it to the world. The power of fake news.
I am surprised that I have found no one in literary circles who has twigged to the parallels with the rise of Donald Trump. If my guess is correct, the cultural conditions that Coover intuited in the 1960’s are precisely those that led 60 years later to the rise of the Deplorables - the largely uneducated ex-urban population, serving in fast-food peonage, inheritors of bad genes and worse teeth, hooked on booze or oxycodone, and one paycheck from utter penury - as a political force in the land. Coover saw the potential connection between the Evangelicals and this dis-enfranchised under-class: The New Heartland with deep roots in the settlement of the continent. The narrative doesn’t write itself, but when it does get written it is responded to enthusiastically.
The connection among the disparate inhabitants of this heartland is, of course, the extreme tendency to believe one’s own press as the only one that isn’t fake: “their canonical faith in their own private ways to truth.” In other political systems religious enthusiasts form minority parties, allowing participation in coalition governments. This is infeasible in America. Elsewhere in the world, the working poor might join communist or socialist parties. In America this is not an option. But the discovery of their commonality, essentially their insistence on the partiality and corruption of ‘the system,’ gives them, the immoderately pious and those left behind in the progress of capitalism, formidable political power. Each faction in this coalition recognises the irrationality of its alliance with the others. But as so many have pointed out during the era of Trumpism, ‘they don’t care.’ Messianism has never been a rational undertaking; and neither has popular insurrection.
It seems to me that Coover has continued the tradition of Theodore Dreiser and John dos Passos, among others, who understood the dynamics of discontent and resentment inherent in American society. The myth of an unlimited future - economic, political, sociological - inhibited taking this discontent and resentment seriously. Essentially that myth has now been debunked. The future looks as grim as the present. Call it the End Times or Revolution, religious ideology combined with economic desperation packs a punch. And the punch destroys much of current society. But ‘They don’t care.’ They have grace. God is with them. They are “victims of transcendence.”
h2oetry's review
5.0
In the novel, a small town, West Condon, is tossed into a frenzy when Deepwater Number Nine Coalmine collapses. Scores of lives are lost. Families torn apart. Religious congregations are forced to reorder hierarchy. Newspapers, unions, mystics, out-of-towners: they all want to be able to define the disaster on their own terms. Meanwhile, the city of West Condon suffers and tries to cope.
Filling the void of disaster is a rare moment in which a community can forge a new identity. It’s made far easier when a story or myth can back up the new identity. In many cases a disaster is simply book-ended with another disaster, or -- as it is called more often -- an apocalypse. End of the World dynamics have been at play pretty much since humans felt that Another Side was speaking to Them.
When an Event lacks answers, it is more difficult to question the interpretations growing out from it. Swindlers of all kinds have a heyday: money is to be had, minds are to be manipulated, heroism is to be retroactive, martyrs abound. West Condon was ripe for a paradigm shift with the coal mine collapse. Many succumbed. A new religion was formed, a prophet provided a mantle. All of these things were made possible by the first tragedy in the coal mine.
Angelo Moroni, a character from the novel that was working in the mine, is a name embedded deeply into Mormon mythology. Indeed, it was Angel Moroni(muh-ROW-nye), who was said to have appeared in visions to the imaginative, young Joseph Smith in the early 1800s to lead him toward his Gold Plates from which he said he transcribed the Book of Mormon, the Latter-day Saint scripture which serves as the keystone to the most American of all religions.[***footnote]
Everyone in the town is eager to see what will happen; all eyes and minds are transfixed on either the What Has or What Will on the happenings. In “Origin of the Brunists,” we see this even in the traffic -- when the coal mine collapses, the streets are jam packed, keeping even rescuers and responders from arriving in proper time. Fast forward to another, later Event on the mountain -- where the purported End of the World is said to be ushered in -- and the streets are similarly packed, perhaps with the same curious people fueled with similar denial and intrigue. I don’t want to reveal too much, but the parallels of the Events are striking, booming, Other-Worldly.
With this being his first novel, it’s no wonder that Robert Coover has maintained an acclaimed writing career. I am very antsy to get my hands on the sequel to this novel, which is in the final stages of publication. It has been a long road -- The Origin of the Brunists was published nearly 50 years ago in 1966. The story stands well alone, but could have wonderful results when we find out what else has gone on in West Condon since we last heard dispatches from the malleable folks.
:::::::::::::
:::::::::::::
[***footnote] Angelo isn’t in very many scenes -- he succumbs to the early mine disaster, he was a boss -- but it is alluded that he tried with Pilate-like lukewarmness to prevent such disasters by demanding that his workers not smoke in the mines, for fear of sparking the gas from the mine’s crevasses. There’s perhaps more to this train of thought, and that is why I make note of it here. Anyone who has seen the top of a Mormon temple has seen a figure in gold blowing a trumpet facing east, essentially a heavenly version of the Jerry West NBA logo. This figure is Angel Moroni. He sounds his cry of warning to all that will listen, and alas, most either refuse to listen. I am trying to find allusions to this in scholarly work -- writer Brian Evenson has written on Coover’s works and might be the best source since he grew up Mormon(as did I). I contacted him to ask his thoughts if he’ll oblige. I think there is a lot going on in this novel that might be passed over with a pedestrian read, because the narrative is so straightforward. You don’t need to know that Angelo Moroni has Mormon significance to gain much from the story, but I imagine a writer like Coover doesn’t just pepper his works with happenstance for the hell of it. As soon as I hear a response from Brian Evenson -- if he does respond -- then I will update the review.
Filling the void of disaster is a rare moment in which a community can forge a new identity. It’s made far easier when a story or myth can back up the new identity. In many cases a disaster is simply book-ended with another disaster, or -- as it is called more often -- an apocalypse. End of the World dynamics have been at play pretty much since humans felt that Another Side was speaking to Them.
When an Event lacks answers, it is more difficult to question the interpretations growing out from it. Swindlers of all kinds have a heyday: money is to be had, minds are to be manipulated, heroism is to be retroactive, martyrs abound. West Condon was ripe for a paradigm shift with the coal mine collapse. Many succumbed. A new religion was formed, a prophet provided a mantle. All of these things were made possible by the first tragedy in the coal mine.
Angelo Moroni, a character from the novel that was working in the mine, is a name embedded deeply into Mormon mythology. Indeed, it was Angel Moroni(muh-ROW-nye), who was said to have appeared in visions to the imaginative, young Joseph Smith in the early 1800s to lead him toward his Gold Plates from which he said he transcribed the Book of Mormon, the Latter-day Saint scripture which serves as the keystone to the most American of all religions.[***footnote]
Everyone in the town is eager to see what will happen; all eyes and minds are transfixed on either the What Has or What Will on the happenings. In “Origin of the Brunists,” we see this even in the traffic -- when the coal mine collapses, the streets are jam packed, keeping even rescuers and responders from arriving in proper time. Fast forward to another, later Event on the mountain -- where the purported End of the World is said to be ushered in -- and the streets are similarly packed, perhaps with the same curious people fueled with similar denial and intrigue. I don’t want to reveal too much, but the parallels of the Events are striking, booming, Other-Worldly.
With this being his first novel, it’s no wonder that Robert Coover has maintained an acclaimed writing career. I am very antsy to get my hands on the sequel to this novel, which is in the final stages of publication. It has been a long road -- The Origin of the Brunists was published nearly 50 years ago in 1966. The story stands well alone, but could have wonderful results when we find out what else has gone on in West Condon since we last heard dispatches from the malleable folks.
:::::::::::::
:::::::::::::
[***footnote] Angelo isn’t in very many scenes -- he succumbs to the early mine disaster, he was a boss -- but it is alluded that he tried with Pilate-like lukewarmness to prevent such disasters by demanding that his workers not smoke in the mines, for fear of sparking the gas from the mine’s crevasses. There’s perhaps more to this train of thought, and that is why I make note of it here. Anyone who has seen the top of a Mormon temple has seen a figure in gold blowing a trumpet facing east, essentially a heavenly version of the Jerry West NBA logo. This figure is Angel Moroni. He sounds his cry of warning to all that will listen, and alas, most either refuse to listen. I am trying to find allusions to this in scholarly work -- writer Brian Evenson has written on Coover’s works and might be the best source since he grew up Mormon(as did I). I contacted him to ask his thoughts if he’ll oblige. I think there is a lot going on in this novel that might be passed over with a pedestrian read, because the narrative is so straightforward. You don’t need to know that Angelo Moroni has Mormon significance to gain much from the story, but I imagine a writer like Coover doesn’t just pepper his works with happenstance for the hell of it. As soon as I hear a response from Brian Evenson -- if he does respond -- then I will update the review.
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