The Resurrectionists

Michael Collins, the author of The Keepers of Truth (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2000), returns to depressed midwestern America in his latest novel, an encyclopedia of familial despair, suffering, and cruelty loosely organized into the semblance of a plot. Into barely 300 pages Collins packs thievery, arson, polio, grave-robbing, murder, a coma, cancer, death row, insanity, child abuse (several varieties), alcoholism, trampled mice, and falling space junk. As in The Keepers of Truth, these plot complications are mainly window-dressing for the hero's gloomy, overwrought meditations on the darkness at the heart of the American dream. Here is the hero, Frank, contemplating his graduation day: "Our bloodlust survives our education, despite our attempts at civilization. We are not so far removed from our forebears, from the fur trappers who first wandered into this wilderness we call America." One wishes this were sly parody, but humor is not Collins's strong suit.

The tale of family dysfunction as a metaphor for the dark id of American culture has a long and perhaps overrich history in American literature, from The Scarlet Letter to the wealth of cathartic novels and memoirs churned out today. If handled with ingenuity and subtlety, this theme could remain fresh. Unfortunately, Collins betrays the limits of his imagination when he resorts to quoting popular television shows of the 1970s to create a sense of time and context; easy-bake cultural references of this sort are rapidly going stale. But Collins has a message to deliver, and such obvious devices serve his purpose all the more.

It's a shame, because he is undeniably a gifted writer, with an ear for certain registers of speech and a nose for the telling detail. Many have described his prose as "vivid," which is true if vague. His writing is naturally concrete; he eschews words like "vivid" in favor of relaying what he sees: "A neon cherry flashed on a martini glass that tipped back and forth on the sign outside a bar called the Well. Happy Hour All Night Long is what it said on the door, but nobody looked happy inside." One keeps turning pages, savoring pithy moments like this, long after wearying of the mouthpiece characters and their trumped-up travails. If Collins devoted less time to sermonizing and more attention to the mechanics of storytelling, he could produce something approaching the grandeur to which he aspires.

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