Stranger Comes to Town

In recent years, there has been a spate of books that deal with our current ecological situation in grimly apocalyptic terms—Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2004) are two of the most well-known examples. But there have also been quieter, more quotidian narratives, like Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010), that address the desperate state of our natural world, and L. C. Fiore’s Green Gospel is an example of exactly that kind of story. Nothing of world-changing significance happens here: instead, the characters in this novel see the same signs of ecological ruin we all do—roads filled with SUVs, huge swaths of development in what had once been natural areas, the frightening ecological effects of contemporary warfare, etc. And while the Green Gospel doesn’t have the despairing grandeur of the Atwood or McCarthy novels, it does reveal to us, in its own terms, how our human relationships, including our notions about our own selves, are influenced by what is unfolding in the natural world around us. As one of the characters says, “Progress as new construction, as new technology, as peace. But progress without morals, without conscience, isn’t progress at all.”

Detail from cover

Fiore’s novel in many ways follows the trajectory of the outsider-comes-to-town narrative, and in doing so cannot help but remind the reader of classic examples of this type of storytelling, especially William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932). A mysterious young woman shows up one rainy night in the Florida town called Arcadia; she moves in with one family, and then another, and begins to put down roots in the community. Then, in a manner reminiscent of the way Faulkner suddenly breaks away from present-day story in Light in August in order to tell us the history behind Joe Christmas, Fiore flashes backward into time to let us know what really happened in Edie’s past. The danger in this type of storytelling, of course, is that the frame narrative might overshadow the flashback narrative, or vice versa, and this is what happens in Green Gospel. Though Fiore’s Florida scenes are solid and well crafted, the flashback narrative detailing Edie’s life-story is brilliant: it is a section related in impressionistic fragments that almost glitter on the page. This moment in the novel jumps about from Edie’s memories of album covers from her youth, to her knowledge of the history of red-haired individuals (she herself having red hair), to her early sexual experiences, to her shift from edgy environmentalism to acts of eco-terrorism. The effect is collage-like. A note about how the bones of red-haired men were once ground up for potions is juxtaposed with a scene where Edie, who is gathering signatures for an environmental cause, has a door slammed in her face. The author doesn’t make any overt connection: rather, he lets us see how in Edie’s mind having red hair and being committed to certain environmental causes places her on the dangerous and experimental side of history.

Novels that begin on a competent level but then launch into stretches of brilliance always lead me to suspect that the author’s true passions are with the more visceral sections of that tale. And I did wonder what a novel that had focused on Edie all along might have been like, and if a more incisive book might have been written with her more completely in the foreground. Even the writing on the sentence level seems more vivid in this section. We are told Edie is attracted to a man (later, her boyfriend) partly because he talked “as if a million fragments of painted glass rattled inside his brain and he was trying to select the most pure, the most brilliant, each time he spoke.” The line is gorgeous without being showy, and such risky lyricism is rare in the opening...