Book Review 2012-010
The Origin of the Brunists by Robert Coover
1966 by W.W. Norton, 441 pages
(I bought this used copy two weeks ago)
There's one aspect to reviewing a nearly 50 year old novel that won the William Faulkner Award for Best First Novel, and that's that you at least sit down with a book you're pretty sure is going to be worth your time. On the flip side, it might be a tad difficult to find anything original to say about the book, however I did manage to read it without really knowing much about it beyond the fact that it was Robert Coover's debut novel, and that it won that award. I'm a fan of Coover's work, but realized recently that while I've bought and read just about everything he's published since 1988, when I first stumbled upon his short story "The Babysitter" and was simply blown away, I never really went backwards and discovered his earlier work--something I'm rectifying these days.
It's truly difficult to believe that this was a first novel. It's 400 plus pages of fairly small print, there are probably close to two dozen extremely well developed and necessary characters, a cataclysmic event (fire/explosion in a coal mine, killing all but one just under one hundred men that were underground) occurs which ends up giving the reader access to every aspect of the town, West Condon, that the novel is set in. Coover's writing shows an extreme confidence--for instance this bit describing the beginning of a work week stretches on and on, but is worth every second you'll spend reading it:
West Condon, as though unable to gaze any longer upon the deep black reach of night, rolls over on its back to receive the Monday sun, now rising, as men say, in the eastern sky: the eye of God, the golden chariot, the communal hearthfire and source of life, the solar center that, for all its berserk fury, still works it daily anodyne magic on man's ultimately incurable disease of dread and despair. Its first rays glance off the top of the West Condon Hotel, the high school flagpole, roof and treetops, the Deepwater No. 9 tipple and watertower, and, close by, the small irregular rise, now internationally known as the Mount of Redemption, where this morning occasional white chicken feathers lie like a fall of manna, their barbs gummed into clubs by the dew. Although no one is out at the mine, on the flagpole, or in the treetops, and thus cannot see the sun until at least another hour's roll has lapsed, and though, as a matter of further fact, almost none will bother to look at it when it can be seen, its radiations are nevertheless early perceived: they shred dreams, calm the sleepless, turn West Condon on: clocks sound, radios crow, throats hack, razors buzz, frypans heat, toilets flush, children scuffle, doors bang, church and school bells ring, forks clink, toasters pop, motors turn over, sweepers roar, it is Monday morning.
I'm not overly familiar with the literary landscape of 1966 but do question whether many novelist would have gone so deep into a description. Fortunately for readers of The Origin of the Brunists, Coover does so regularly.
Brunists? The one survivor of the blast was a lapsed Catholic named Giovanni Bruno, and Coover allows his survival to trigger a new religion. The novel is incredibly multi-dimensional as Coover delves into religion in general, and more specifically into the development of a new religion along with the fears and issues of those outside that new religion. He also takes a great look inside how the print media works, and small-town politics as well as looking at power and how people both use it and try to attain it. Which is all to say that this is not simply a "religious" novel. It's a novel that I think appropriately won the William Faulkner Award as it might take as in-depth a look at the human condition as any novel that I've read.
I think that ironically as his debut effort, it might also be the perfect entry into that shelf's worth of Coover's work for a new reader. While there are still some sly moves toward the post-modern writing Coover is maybe best known for, some magic realist elements specifically in a couple of of the voices, the novel is still very straightforward and fairly linear. Again, he's created a stunning number of memorable characters from Giovanni Bruno, to Clara Collins--wife of Ely, a Preacher/miner who died in the mine, having left a quick note for her before dying (she is one of the biggest proponents of the new religion), Ralph Himebaugh, a city lawyer that is fascinated with numerology and formulas who finds facts from the numbers involved in the blast, John "Tiger" Miller, former athlete extraordinarie convinced to come back to West Condon to buy and run the newspaper, Eleanor Norton (schoolteacher) and her husband Wylie (veteranarian), who follow the words of a spirit, Domiron, who at times takes over Elan's (his name for her) body and she awakes having written journal entries that she tries to interpret--a lifestyle which has led to their being run out of many a town in the past), Ted Cavanaugh, banker and true power broker behind anything that happens in the city, Vince Bonali, former lineman blocker to Cavanaugh's fullback the last time the city had a great football team, now a miner without any direction to his life until Ted pins him to run the Common Sense Committee (effectively trying to quiet down the doomsday predictions of the new religion as they certainly weren't going to help attract new business to the city), and the list simply continues. Again, truly amazing for any novel, let alone a first effort.
5 stars
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