Dennis Haritou: It’s been a while since I’ve read God Is Dead by Ron Currie, that sulphurous book, but I am still washing the brimstone off my hands. After some time has past between yourself and a book, like with people, your experience starts to distill and you only remember the principal points, together with some of the specifics that impacted you, that represent the collision of your mind with the story.
What I most remember about Dead is the palpable sense of physical risk, a vulnerability so incisive that it could be tasted and smelt. I associate it with a spiritual risk, an attempted raping of the soul, and the genuine presence of evil. The physical risk to the body, the fear that one might be shot, or trampled on, or wasted away by disease and the moral risk, that the existential pressures could become so great that your soul could be lost, are somehow intermixed in God Is Dead.
This leads me directly to the next point I would like to make about Currie, that he seems like a Catholic writer. If so, then he is a Catholic who doesn’t believe in God from what I hear but that doesn’t alter the sensibility so maybe I should have used a small “c”.
In Dead the scene that unnerves me the most is when God, who has taken on the form of an abused African woman, dies from her great suffering and has her body, in part, devoured by feral dogs. Since the dogs have consumed the holy substance, their minds are altered and they attain a human-like or more than human level of consciousness. Later a human ingests the same sacred substance and it drives him mad. I believe that Ron thinks this is funny in his black humor, let’s all have a beer over this, sort of way. It’s totally wild, that’s for sure. It’s nuts. It’s inspired. Only a talented-as-hell writer could think this way: That’s the way Ron thinks.
In Zadie Smith’s great novel, On Beauty, there is a send-up scene where a very secular character attends a performance of Mozart’s Requiem on the Boston Common. The character blands-out Mozart, going on about his “genius”. But the character has no idea what the different sections of the Mass signify. Indeed, the character doesn’t even know what a Mass is but is listening to one, totally clueless. This is secular idiocy in its purest form but a secular person wouldn’t even get the joke. To have more than a head nodding appreciation of Mozart, you have to know he was Catholic. It was important to him. You should also know he was a Mason and what that means. Yes, the art is in the notes, but you can’t superciliously ignore the credo stuff.
Ron Currie’s canines devour God’s body in a jokey perversion of the Eucharist. Most Sundays, I stand before my Episcopal altar and take communion. And I am very grateful for the opportunity to do so. Actually, the word “grateful” doesn’t cover it. But I don’t take offense at what Currie is trying to say. It’s brilliant. But, as with my Zadie Smith example, if you are uninformed about such things then you don’t get the point…or fully appreciate the black humor that is an important part of God Is Dead.
Everything Matters! is Ron Currie’s debut novel. If you are a Ron Currie fan, as I am, just the phrase “Ron Currie’s debut novel” has got to send chills down your spine. Everthing Matters! is currently honoring my laptop by residing in it. I am reading it now. I am halfway done so that qualifies my remarks. But I can’t wait to tell you about it.
The opening scene is a account of his hero’s existence inside his mother’s womb…by a third person narrator whose identity is unclear. It’s amazing. It’s phenomenal. It’s like Ron was there (of course, we all were) and it’s surely way Catholic. But the point I want to make most is that it shows Ron’s talent for empathy. In Dead I was startled by how well Ron could describe animal consciousness and then imagine what it would be like, from the inside, for an animal mind to become human or semi-divine. Throughout Everything Matters! the first person is employed liberally. But it’s employed for different characters. Ron Currie is a magician in his ability to jump into the skins of so many different personalities. Ron is a natural, like a naturally gifted baseball player, only its applied to writing. And incidentally, there are some baseball scenes in Everything Matters! that no fan will want to miss.
Everything Matters! also reveals a sharp and wonderful turn toward the new American realism. After Dead, I wondered what a mind like Currie’s, so instinctively mythopoetic, would do with the form of the novel. Would Currie write some sort of fantasy novel with gods and demons or would his new story be down to earth? Well, it looks like it’s really some of both but mostly this novel has its feet very firmly planted in the state of Maine and centers on the history of one working class family. This is a debut novel so I assumed this family saga contained a lot of autobiographic stuff in that mix and match way that writers alchemically employ to mix reality with illusion. The portrait of the father is especially well cut to the bone.
I can’t quote from a draft. That isn’t legit. But there is a passage toward the middle of the book where Ron describes the trials of ordinary folks that is so eloquent, so compassionate towards the human condition of his working class heroes that I was reminded of that pipe dreams passage in The Iceman Cometh and some of the best of Thorton Wilder in Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. I swear, Ron is so talented, there is so much naturally grateful writing in this book and such great family feeling…you know, about the struggles to make it and about the disappointments and regrets of ordinary people who are not privileged. But there is also that offbeat stuff, like the freight train certainty of an impending apocalypse, that is an irremovable part of the Currie universe. You will have to check it out for yourself when you get a chance. The Three Guys plan to discuss Everything Matters! sometime shortly before its publication next year.
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