Nazareth, North Dakota by Tommy Zurhellen (review)

152 BOOK NOTES Nazareth, North Dakota, by Tommy Zurhellen Atticus Books, 2011 reviewed by Wendy Rawlings “Somewhere in North Dakota, an elephant was loose”: this was the moment I committed myself fully to Tommy Zurhellen’s sui generis debut novel, Nazareth, North Dakota. The sentence comes twenty-nine pages in, after a guy gets shot in a motel room, a woman absconds from the motel with someone else’s baby, and the devil himself delivers a monologue. I suppose that the lost elephant, a carnival escapee, added the element of realism I was looking for. Nazareth, North Dakota is in one sense a portrait of a small town in North Dakota from 1983 to present. Using third- and first-person narrators, Zurhellen convincingly creates characters as diverse as the aforementioned devil, a meth addict, an overweight high school kid of Mexican heritage, the kid’s mean police-chief father, and a young woman on the run with an abandoned baby. And it doesn’t end there: I could cite at least a half-dozen other characters that Zurhellen draws so vividly and treats with such empathy that I found myself invested in even the novel’s most unsavory characters. The result of Zurhellen’s artful manipulation of point of view creates a vibrant panorama of a community and the individuals who compose it. The novel is a contemporary retelling of the Messiah story. Its chapters, named for episodes and canticles in the New Testament , call attention to the connections between the ancient story and this contemporary one. For instance, in the chapter titled “Song of Mary,” Nazareth native Roxy, who can’t have children of her own, becomes the guardian of a six-month-old, unnamed infant. Certainly, a reader can compare Roxy to Mary, who in the original Song of Mary visited her cousin Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist. At first, I looked for parallels between biblical characters and Zurhellen’s. While this exercise might be productive for readers with an investment in the story of the Messiah, I didn’t see the need to orient the reader toward the ancient story in order to appreciate Zurhellen’s. And while I 153 Book Notes understand that the story of the Messiah is one of the founding myths of Western culture, the biblical chapter titles overwhelm and bog down this slim novel, which makes moves with time and point of view that are far more daring and original than the reworked biblical themes. Perhaps it’s a compliment more than a criticism to observe that Zurhellen’s first novel tries to do too much in 210 pages; I have read far too many first novels that do too little. The core of this novel is the emergence of two messianic figures deep in the heart of Red State America, where people have been waiting for Him to emerge. There’s Jan, a preacher’s son who upsets the community of Nazareth by performing informal baptisms in the town’s river. And then there’s the more mysterious Sam, abandoned at birth by his teenaged mom and adopted by Roxy. Might either be the Son of God? I couldn’t really see the point in debating this question, as both characters read to me as opaque figures, more symbolic than human. But I found myself deeply engaged by Zurhellen’s sensitive renderings of working-class life in small-town Middle America. Questions of messiahs and redemption faded as I read scene after scene in which Zurhellen casts a laser-sharp eye on the humiliations and injustices of America’s underclass. He presents scenes that reveal the complex power relations between the poor and the very poor, small-town law enforcement and drifters, violent men and the women they control. In one of my favorite scenes, police chief Severo Rodriguez pulls over a van just to hassle its passengers , three men he found distasteful when he saw them in a diner in town. “Yeah, we get a lot of people breaking down on this road all the time. You bet. Why, just last month we had this van full of young punks, a lot like you actually, and the damn thing...