The Keepers of Truth: A Novel

The Irish writer Michael Collins's U.S. debut novel is set in post-1970s small-town America, in the ripped-out heartlands where heavy industry has fallen away, to be replaced by the service industry — burger chains, strip joints, and, indeed, the Curl Up and Dye beauty parlor. The narrator, Bill, whose earnest amateur philosophizing perfectly conveys the mismatch of his wayward intelligence, is intent on writing an elegy for his country; or, perhaps, a wake-up call. But because he works for a local newspaper (called, perhaps heavy-handedly, the Daily Truth), he has constantly to be reminded that facts, not discourses, are the order of the day; a colleague sardonically remarks that his writing is "ambitious beyond the scope of journalism as we know it."

Collins searingly evokes the death of a small post-industrial town. He sketches, through an accumulation of precisely observed details, the cowed and crippled lives of people reduced to nostalgia and appetite. He has written a political novel about apolitical people who seemingly sleepwalk through their own defeat. But Bill needs shaking from torpor: "I had some things I wanted to say all my life. Problem was, I never had a story equal to my ideas."

Driving bake-offs and baseball games from the dull front pages, that story arrives in the form of a missing-persons case. The local bad boy has, apparently, killed and dismembered his father, although only a finger has been found. The moribund town is briefly energized by excitement, rumor, prurience; and the Truth becomes nationally important, and Bill's stories are syndicated nationwide. But Bill becomes entangled with the suspects and witnesses who were supposed to be his story, and events unfold calamitously. Collins produces an unnerving atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion, made the more disturbing by its being filtered through Bill's not wholly reliable mind. Bill, it seems, cannot trust anyone; nor can a reader entirely trust Bill.

Bill's overblown narration, slightly annoying at first, becomes both comical and unsettling as we learn more about him. It also enables Collins to risk, successfully, an elegiac tone of romantic yearning while keeping his eye on the grimly funny details of ordinary life. (A high point of these mock-heroics is a speech Bill gives at Lakeview Community College, in which he drunkenly overturns a podium and a pitcher of water, curses and berates his audience, and finally vomits into a trash can. He later describes this fiasco, deadpan, as "what I like to consider my lecture on 'The Discourse of Language.'") This book, in the words of its narrator, is "an almighty...roar of despair"; but it is also intelligent, witty, humane, and utterly haunting.

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