The Pretenders

There seems to be some strain of Calvinism underlying the greatest feats of self-delusion in this country. The average conspiracy nut who shows up at the public library to fax his latest manifesto to Congress certainly believes himself a member of the elect, able to recognize reality for the lie it is, while his neighbors are among the damned, so much wheat ripening for an alien harvest. In political rhetoric, the label of "un-American" is used to signify someone else's status outside the national ecclesia, where there is no possibility for salvation. But this Calvinism can extend even to genetics. As W. J. Cash pointed out in The Mind of the South (1941), as soon as Southern, white slaveowners accrued enough money and status, they began recruiting ancestors from the noble cavaliers of France so as to distinguish themselves from their racially ambiguous "white trash" kinfolk, for elect status could only be assured through a lineage that excluded all possibility of blackness; and soon enough, families readily accepted the lies their progenitors had crafted. In other words, our ever-American readiness to draw firm lines between the hellbound and the heavenbound offers near endless possibilities for self-deception.

Matt Baker picks up this theme and runs with it in his debut novel, Drag the Darkness Down, which tells the story of Odom Shiloh—the assistant to the assistant football coach in the small Delta town of Frothmouth, Arkansas—and his search for his piano virtuoso sister Bridget (affectionately called Birdshit), who has recently skipped town with the school's football star. Odom is aided in this quest by family friend Blakey Flake, who is ostensibly a private detective with a master's degree in art history and an army of undercover assistants at his beck and call, though the pair spend the first two chapters chasing spurious leads down to Louisiana because no one thought to dial up Birdshit's cell phone and ask where she was. As Odom and Blakey follow Birdshit's trail back to Little Rock and then to Kansas, it is also revealed that Odom is also a fugitive from justice, having, just before the opening chapter, accidentally run over a French cyclist in Memphis, Tennessee.

But there is more going on than this. Blakey might complain about crazy street preachers "grandstanding about divisive belief systems that damn outsiders and offer guarantees only for those who belong," insisting that "anyone with a dozen or more synapses firing in their skull knows there are no shortcuts, life offers no easy paths, except for a very few of us." However, Odom is one of those whom life affords shortcuts, being a member of the secretive Shiloh Foundation, a family-run, Illuminati-type organization that dictates the direction of world commerce and politics from the shadows of Frothmouth—the invisible hand, complete with Masonic-like initiation ceremonies that take place out in the remote Arkansas woods. According to Odom, Blakey works for the Shiloh Foundation, and his Uncle Lou oversees his own related operations from his headquarters in a Kansas City barbeque joint, in the basement of which there take place the occasional acts of torture and interrogation. Odom knows all of this because his father filled him in on his inheritance before mysteriously disappearing in the wake of some federal investigation.

Odom's inability to contrast objectively his own grand assertions about his inheritance and his actual situation—as the assistant to the assistant football coach, on the run from the law, paired with a chain-smoking PI who has his own delusions of grandeur— recalls William Faulkner's Emily Grierson, defining her station in life by the standard of her ancestors, imagining for herself a life filled with love and adoration even as she rests each night next to a corpse. But there is also a great deal of humor in Baker's novel, which recalls Lamar Jimmerson and the Gnomon Society from Charles Portis's comic Masters of Atlantis (1985), its main characters strutting about grandly...