Hick Apocalyptics

Although the 1960s are remembered today more for music than for fiction, a number of important American novelists made their debut that decade: Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, Stanley Elkin, William H. Gass, Joseph Heller, Ken Kesey, Harry Mathews, Joseph McElroy, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Marguerite Young, to name the most prominent. One of the most impressive first novels was Robert Coover’s Origin of the Brunists (1966), the story of a

terrible mine disaster, the lone survivor, the cult that formed up around him, made up of overeducated occultists and ignorant evangelicals possessed by the Jesus demon, their shy privacy shattered by the cynical local newspaperman, who infiltrated the cult and then exposed them to the world, their naïve prophecy about the Second Coming and end of the world, taking place out at an old slag heap which they called the Mount of Redemption, all of it becoming a huge international media event, a bizarre carnival really, and ending in catastrophic failure

—as one character in Coover’s new novel summarizes it. Her auditor metafictionally remarks “it all sounded like the makings of a good novel.”

Coover did indeed make a good novel out of it, the best satire of religion in America since Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry (1927) and a raucous contribution to the genre of American apocalypse that stretches from Michael Wigglesworth’s Day of Doom (1662) through works by Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and Nathanael West, to Coover’s contemporaries Gaddis, Barth, Vonnegut, Elkin, and DeLillo.

Coover’s new novel is set five years after that “bizarre carnival,” by which time the Brunist cult has expanded and is gathering once again in the small town of West Condon for more religious shenanigans, once again convinced that the end times are upon them. Coover replicates both the structure—four parts occupying a little over three months, bookended by a prologue and an epilogue—and the mode of The Origin of the Brunists: realism tottering on the edge of absurdism. Once again, Coover uses free indirect discourse to convey the story, sticking closely to the points-of-view of a large cast of characters, most of them poorly educated rubes, but with a sprinkling of smarter folks for clarification of events (and to convey his own sardonic point of view). Like the size of the cast, everything is supersized in the sequel: not only is it more than twice as long as its predecessor, there are greater amounts of sex and violence, fiercer blasphemies and outrages, and more madness and mayhem, in keeping with the course of American culture over the last fifty years. Though the novel is set in the late ’60s, it is clearly a parable about recent years: in a 2010 interview in Bookslut, Coover said he began gathering notes for a sequel even before the Origin was published, “but the election of young Bush and the rise of the fundamentalists at the turn of the millennium inspired a determined return to the project.”

Coover recreates the theological ambience of American literature in the 1960s, when Christ figures were rampant—Kesey’s Randle Patrick McMurphy, Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy, Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, the title character in Harry Crews’s 1968 debut The Gospel Singer—and when the grand narrative of the Judeo-Christian tradition was superseded by the grander narrative revealed in books like Frazer’s Golden Bough (1890) and Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), both of which are referenced in Coover’s new novel. The (anti)Christ figure in The Origin of the Brunists was the newspaperman Justin Miller, who exposed the cult to ridicule and was apparently killed by them in retaliation, only to be “resurrected” shortly after and is last seen leaving West Condon in the company of the alluringly named Happy Bottom.

Although there is a literal Christ figure in the new novel—a Presbyterian minister who goes mad and believes he’s Jesus—Miller’s role is taken by Sally Elliott, a wisecracking hippie chick who has taken enough college...