The Brunist Day of Wrath by Robert Coover
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Keeping Faith

The Brunist Day of Wrath is much larger than its predecessor, The Origin of the Brunists; it is also more theological, more ethnically tense, and (if this is possible) more desperate and more pessimistic. Perhaps all this reflects the progression of the USA from the publication of Origin in 1967 to that of Day of Wrath in 2014. Almost three generations is enough to change any country fundamentally. Or, given that it has been a somewhat stressful period for Uncle Sam, a long enough period to anneal the country into its terminal form.

The locus of the Day of Wrath, West Condon, has not fared well since the Brunists left at the end of Origin five years previously. The deep mines have closed. The strip mines that replaced them use machines not men to make their money. The flat mid-western countryside looks like it’s been tilled by a race of giant, incompetent farmers. The various remaining Christian churches are mouldering tribal enclaves whose members have lost hope if not faith. The Presbyterian minister has lost both, as well as his marbles.

And to top it off, the Brunists have sneaked back in. The folk of the town don’t like this, but other than bad memories and worse consciences about their expulsion, they really don’t know why. For the Brunists, West Condon is Jerusalem, the place of their originary revelation. For the residents, however, the divine is what they have in hand: “faith was always more an occupational convenience than mission.” And they intend to keep their faith. Yet another desolate place made even more desolate, therefore, by the mysteries of the human mind and spirit.

There is a recent theory that the first European immigrants to America passed on a sort of gullibility gene to their descendants that makes them acutely susceptible to things like advertising, propaganda, and religious cults. It was this trait, the theory goes, which induced them to leave the devils they were told about by promoters, ideologues, and co-religionists for the promise of a devil-free world in North America. In which case the American Dream is a neurosis which becomes a nightmare when slogans, party lines, and doctrines clash, as they inexorably must do. Perhaps West Condon is a sort of case study of the phenomenon. Certainly this is not too extreme an interpretation of Coover.

And therein, I think, lies the central paradox of American life captured by Coover. Herman Melville (The Confidence Man), Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Celestial Railroad) and Mark Twain (The War Prayer) all point to the well-established trait of gullibility but not to its source. H.G. Wells (War of the Worlds) and Lyndon Johnson (The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution) exploited the trait but didn't care to explain it. This is where Coover comes into his own, even before the emergence of Trump as the preeminent symbol of the national condition created by both nature and nurture.

Lacking common culture, the binding national force in America is economics. What is shared is neither history nor national ambition but a vague potential and desire for getting ahead. Efficiency - of production, of consumption, of life itself - is consequently the default criterion of success according to accepted economic theory. And efficiency can only be established through competition - among companies, between individuals, and in the great marketplace of ideas - including most significantly religious ideas. Efficiency implies that the less efficient - companies, people and ideas - cannot, should not, prosper. Their fate is to serve those who do; or die out. Competitive faith is as hard a regime in the 21st century as it was in the 16th or in the 1st, when it was first mooted.

In this sense at least, America is a truly Christian country, a country of faith. Intensity of belief is what matters - ultimately in oneself if one is sufficiently jaded by doctrinal religion (or in oneself as God in the doctrines of the Prosperity Gospel and Mormonism). This culture has no interest in genetics or background (except, of course, if one is of African origin, but there are none of these in West Condon). Faith, loyalty, boosterism, team playing, enthusiastic fealty to one’s beliefs and the group which supports, and likely provided, them is what really matters. The tradition of this culture of efficiency is not so much the substance of the beliefs but in the insistence with which one adheres to them. How many Christians after all concern themselves one way or the other with the issue of the Virgin Birth for example. One sides with the tribe in such matters. Individual thought is not encouraged in the land of individualism, strangely the most conformist place on the planet.

Forbes magazine, hardly a leftist mouthpiece, called gullibility “the American tax on optimism” (https://www.forbes.com/sites/richkarl...). But it is gullible insistence which breeds its own optimism, a kind of fellow well met cheeriness which is not infrequently about the end of the world as we know it, a joyful apocalypticism. Gullibility is a necessary correlate of the culture of efficiency. Without it America would never have existed, and could not continue to exist.

This is why nothing sells quite so well in America as righteous, political, divinely sanctioned, end-times anger (wrath, in other words) directed against a demonised ideological foe - socialists, immigrants, government, Jews, people of colour, elite city folk, the Other in general. Their alternative faith, or their lack of faith entirely, imply a challenge to one’s own beliefs that must be responded to with vigour and, if necessary, violence. This is the law of the frontier, or at least the myths handed down about the frontier (keeping in mind the gullibility gene).

America is indeed “the world behaving as a theater for [one’s] inmost thoughts” As Trump so diligently demonstrates daily. This means, as one of Coover’s characters points out that “The end of the world, Mr. Jenkins, is not an event; it is a kind of knowledge.” This knowledge seems unique to the culture of efficiency which correctly predicts its own inevitable demise - there is only one most efficient survivor after all. One wonders what the sequel to Day of Wrath might reveal about its further evolution... or it’s fading remnants.

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