The Origin of the Brunists by Robert Coover
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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.”

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