Revival Season by Monica West

Published by Simon & Schuster on May 25, 2021

A teenage daughter comes to realize that her father, “the Faith Healer of East Mansfield, Texas,” in whom she has invested her whole-hearted support, is a liar and a sinner. Actually, Samuel Horton is a grifter with a serious anger management problem, but Miriam Horton is too young to see her father in those terms. In her early teens, Miriam is beginning to consider rebellion against her father’s strict rules, although she doesn’t dare express those thoughts in his presence. Nor does she have the typical motivation for rebellion, having apparently never entertained a sexual thought in her life. She does have a mild crisis of faith, which at her age and in her situation is indistinguishable from a crisis of family. Unfortunately, Miriam never makes the intellectual leap that would cause her to look beyond her father’s overbearing behavior and to understand that she’s living in a religious subculture that will never value her, despite her growing belief that she is every bit as capable as her father of performing miracles.

Miriam’s mother apparently believes that Samuel has the power to heal, although she might just be playing her role in the family. Miriam’s brother Caleb definitely believes. He’s being groomed as the family’s next great faith healer. Samuel’s failure to heal most people who come to him is easily dismissed as God’s choice or a lack of faith on the part of the infirm, while his few apparent successes are embraced as proof of Samuel’s spiritual power. Blaming God for failure is the great convenience of a religious con. Those who might wonder why Samuel can’t heal his daughter Hannah, who was born with cerebral palsy and needs crutches and braces to walk, are told that her condition is God’s plan.

Miriam’s best friend Micah is diabetic. The story suggests that Samuel failed to heal Micah, that Miriam secretly healed her, and that Samuel is taking credit for it. The “miraculous” change in blood sugar levels is temporary, leading to one of many rifts between Samuel and his deacons. That rift and some violent episodes in Samuel’s life are dividing the parish and making it difficult for Samuel to pay the mortgage.

Miriam secretly enters the healing game with a fury when she learns that she can heal more capably than her father. Samuel is infuriated when he learns that she is a usurper. Even Miriam’s mother has been taught to believe that it’s a sin for a woman to do the work of men. Miriam’s biggest test will come if she decides to heal Hannah.

Revival Season is told from Miriam’s perspective as a teenager whose family travels the summer revival circuit. The novel’s focus on Miriam is dictated by the story’s first-person narration. The problem is that Miriam, having been home-schooled and largely homebound, isn’t an interesting character. She speaks in clichés (“I watched Papa like a hawk”) because her life as a southern evangelical is a cliché. A teenager who seems to have no interest in moving beyond the narrow confines of her existence (apart from secretly using her healing powers) has little of importance to share with the reader.

Miriam’s deeply flawed father is a more interesting character than Miriam simply because of his flaws. How does he feel about his crumbling life when parishioners abandon his church and other churches stop booking his revival appearances? If he really believes he can heal, how does he feel when that power dissipates? We get a sense from a sermon that he feels threatened by Miriam. We get a sense of his distress or frustration from Miriam, who perceives his growing tendency toward violence and rage, but Miriam’s perspective is shallow and self-absorbed, befitting her age and upbringing. How does Caleb feel about being the heir apparent to a father who is on the verge of losing his revival empire? We only catch a glimpse of Caleb’s evolving realization that his father can’t really heal people. A third person perspective that looked more deeply into the lives of Samuel and Miriam’s other family members would have offered greater insight into the world that Miriam inhabits.

Fiction allows readers to imagine, and perhaps to understand, lives that are far beyond their own. The novel doesn’t help the reader understand enough about the subculture that embraces revivals and faith healers. The novel is missing the atmospheric detail that creates a sense of realism. The characters seem like stereotypes — the abusive preacher who puts self-interest above concern for those he claims to heal, the meek wife who wants to leave but can’t bring herself to abandon her children — and the story does too little to give them personalities outside of their stereotypes.

I imagine Revival Season is intended as an allegory of female empowerment. It almost works on that level, although Miriam’s empowerment is equated with having an equal right to be a faith healer. Whether Miriam is actually healing anyone rather than creating the appearance of healing, like her father does, is never clear. The story would have been more honest if it suggested that Miriam was just as capable as her father of being self-deluded or a grifter. That would have preserved the allegory while adding intellectual honesty, but it also would have made Miriam just as unsympathetic as her father, so I understand why Monica West chose not to go in that direction. If Miriam wanted real empowerment, she’d encourage her mother to walk away and take the kids (a moment that is foreshadowed but never happens).

The novel might also be read as an indictment of faith healing, home-schooling, and a culture of ignorance, but that doesn’t seem to be the novel’s intent. This is a book that might appeal to certain readers of faith, depending on the nature of their faith. The story has some merit, but it just didn’t appeal to me.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Scorpion by Christian Cantrell

Published by Random House on May 25, 2021

Scorpion is a near-future thriller. The protagonists both work for the CIA. Quinn Mitchell is an analyst and Henrietta Yi is a quantum physicist. They approach the same mystery from very different perspectives.

The prologue tells us that while she was working on her doctorate, Henrietta reviewed data from the Large Hadron Collider particle detector. Buried in the data, she found an encryption header and encrypted data, as well as two lines of text from Shakespeare. The data comes to be known as the Epoch Index.

Quinn was assigned to a task force that searched for enriched nuclear material, a good bit of which has gone missing over the years. As that project ends, Deputy Director Vanessa Townes assigns Quinn to investigate a series of murders. That’s not a normal assignment for the CIA, which usually commits rather than solves murders, but these are international killings and Interpol has asked for an assist. Each victim has been killed in a different, usually high-tech way. The murders are clever and untraceable. The victims seem to have been killed in descending order by age, ending with a nine-month-old baby. The killer brands each body with a four-digit number for reasons that Quinn will eventually discern.

The killer is known to the CIA only as the Elite Assassin, but he is known to the reader as Ranveer. Christian Cantrell does not initially disclose how or why the victims were selected but makes it clear that the list of targets has been assigned to Ranveer. When the novel is well underway, the reader will begin to suspect that Ranveer is not quite who he seems to be. The reader will also be surprised to learn who has been assigning targets to him.

Townes’ boss is Alessandro Moretti. Henrietta now works for Moretti, who refers to her as his “tech guy.” Her job is to decrypt the Epoch Index, which she believes to be a message form the future. When Henrietta meets Quinn at Moretti’s direction to install a new app on Quinn’s phone — a task that seems well below Henrietta’s pay grade — the reader will suspect that the Epoch Index is connected to the murders that Quinn is investigating.

Cantrell traces the obstacles and obsessions that shape his protagonists without distracting from the plot. Henrietta lost her parents when Seoul was destroyed in a nuclear blast. She is an avid collector of Pokémon figures. Henrietta has an unusual disability that seems like a bit of color until it becomes directly relevant to the plot. Quinn no longer cuts herself, but she has engaged in “emotional cutting” since her daughter drowned. She carries a torch for her former husband and reignites it during the course of the novel. Both characters are socially isolated, although Henrietta is isolated more by nature than circumstance. Both are smart and good at their jobs. Quinn is particularly adept at using Artificial Intelligence to help her track down the Elite Assassin. Both feel conflicted about working for the CIA, although Henrietta comes to feel she has sold her soul to Morietti, in part because she might be empowering him to devise history’s most powerful weapon. Henrietta eventually seizes an opportunity to change her future, and perhaps the future of humanity. Character development is more than sufficient for a thriller that is driven by plot and ideas more than characters.

Quantum physics is full of surprises. Cantrell takes advantage of that fact to develop the plot in surprising ways. As the protagonists intertwine, they are forced to confront, and perhaps to change, their value systems as they weigh the greater good against lesser (but substantial) evils. The old philosophical thought experiment — would justice be served by killing Hitler as an infant, despite his youthful innocence? — becomes, by analogy, the story’s driving moral question. The story also raises questions that are familiar to science fiction fans about the nature of destiny and free will. Is it really necessary to kill Hitler? Might it possible to make small changes in his early life that, over the course of time, will prevent him from becoming a megalomaniac and German nationalist? Perhaps hugs can shape the future as effectively as bullets.

The near future in which Scorpion is set hasn’t changed much, apart from the destruction of Seoul, but Cantrell does suggest the occurrence of subtle changes that create a credible atmosphere. One thing that hasn’t changed is the revulsion the rest of world feels when America arrogantly pronounces itself to be exceptional.

While the plot is a bit convoluted, the unfolding mystery and the need to keep the reader engaged and guessing demands a certain complexity. An evolution in the relationship of two characters is abrupt, but it occurs during the untold story that occurs during a jump forward in the narrative. Cantrell probably made a wise choice not to waste time showing the reader how it happened. Why it happened seems clear enough. The novel leaves a few other questions unanswered, giving the reader room to wonder what might happen next. The story nevertheless feels complete. Science fiction and thriller fans should both enjoy it.

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Against the Law by David Gordon

Published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on May 25, 2021

The third book in the Joe the Bouncer series returns Joe Brody to the fight against terrorism. Joe is a former Special Forces guy who has conquered addictions and other demons. Now he works as a strip club bouncer who does freelance work for Gio, the Mafia boss who owns the club. His freelance work so far has advanced the New York underworld’s war on terror, a war it fights because terrorism is bad for business. And because doing occasional favors for the FBI and CIA has its perks.

Much of Against the Law will be familiar to series readers. Joe the criminal continues his flirtation with Donna the FBI agent, who continues her distrust of the CIA agent to whom she was once married. Joe continues something more than a flirtation with Yelena the Russian criminal. Donna’s mother continues her friendship with Joe’s grandmother. All of those characters play important roles in the novel.  As one might hope and expect in a series, a couple of these relationships change by the time the novel ends. Even a subplot involving Gio’s marital problems, exacerbated by proclivities that he tried to hide from his wife, appears to be resolved.

The story begins in Afghanistan, where Joe has traveled to kill Zahir, a nemesis he has seen before. Zahir has been smuggling high quality heroin into New York by unknown means. Zahir seems to be trying to corner the New York drug market with better heroin than the locals are supplying. Zahir then funnels the profits to terrorist cells. New York’s criminal organizations don’t appreciate foreign competition. Gio and the other crime czars are paying Joe a half million dollars to take out Zahir.

When Joe’s mission doesn’t go as planned, the plot detours to a corporation called Wildwater (think Halliburton combined with the company formerly known as Blackwater). The CIA is in bed with Wildwater, which is in bed with Zahir and with a psychopathic military contractor named Toomey. Toomey’s take on the war against terror is to inflict some terror of his own, bringing about the clash of civilizations for which people on the far right long, provided they are not personally inconvenienced by the clash. All of those entities in the same bed makes a predictable mess. It falls to Joe and his underworld buddies, with an assist from Donna, to clean up the mess and once again save New York from imminent disaster.

This book seems to bring to an end to a three-book arc, while leaving room to move forward with the development of certain characters and their relationships. While the familiar characters are likeable, the familiar plot — Joe takes on terrorists, fights and kills and survives — has become a bit predictable. I have enjoyed all the Joe the Bouncer novels, but I enjoyed this one less because it seemed like a book I had read twice before. I hope David Gordon moves Joe away from terrorism plots and toward something fresh and original in the next novel. Still, I look forward to reading the next one because Joe the Bouncer remains a unique and engaging criminal protagonist.

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The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Mariner Books on May 25, 2021

The Apocalypse Seven is a light, moderately clever take on post-apocalypse fiction combined with a mystery. The story imagines that seven characters wake up and notice an accumulation of strange things as they go about their business. At first, they notice the absence of traffic sounds. When they go outside, they notice the absence of other people. And then they notice that things have changed. There are deer roaming in the city. Grass hasn’t been mowed; lawns have gone wild. Electricity isn’t working. Batteries are dead. An occasional building has disappeared or been replaced with a different building. Toward evening, they notice the wolves, which turn out to be coyotes bred with dogs. And eventually they notice that the weather is strange.

As the title implies, the seven characters eventually come together. Five of them wake up in Boston or Cambridge. One is a woman in the nearby countryside whose horse has disappeared. The seventh is a preacher in New Hampshire. One of the women who work up near Harvard is blind; her dog is gone. The fact that they all find each other so easily is difficult to believe, but the reader will need to suspend belief repeatedly to enjoy the novel.

Given the evident changes in their environment, it will be obvious to the reader that some time passed while the characters were sleeping. It takes the characters a surprisingly long time to work that out. It also takes surprisingly long before they realize that they each have a different understanding of what year it was when they went to sleep. The characters are more focused on speculating about the reason everyone else has disappeared — they decide to call it the whateverpocalypse — and wondering whether they should be searching for other survivors.

Much of the novel is spent exploring each character’s reaction to the need for immediate survival. A 14-year-old girl contributes her lock picking skills. A woman from MIT is good with stars and calculating the passage of time. The preacher is good with a gun and the horse woman — who finds and tames a wild horse — is good with a bow. The blind woman is good at taming wolves. The other two guys aren’t terribly useful but they supply manual labor and moral support. Working together and helping each other, they manage to survive some mildly harrowing experiences. At some point a new kid makes a brief and babbling appearance, but he doesn’t last long.

The mystery, of course, is the cause of the whateverpocalypse. Contributing to the mystery are some sparkling lights that appear at seemingly random intervals, sometimes taking vaguely humanoid shapes and other times just spinning around like disco balls. Then there’s a white tube with a cap sticking out of the ground, constructed of an unknown material, that seems to have some significance to the sparkling lights. Finally, there’s something like a ghost with body odor who occasionally appears and speaks to the characters, unless they are imagining him.

I won’t give away the answer to the mystery but I will say that Gene Doucette supplies one. It even makes some superficial sense if you don’t try to pick it apart. I’m not sure that everything in the story makes sense, nor am I sure that every event that deserves a credible explanation receives one, but the plot is really just a vehicle for the characters to interact with each other as the pursue their post-apocalyptic survival adventures.

The characters are all remarkably cooperative and relatively drama-free. That makes them likable, but it diminishes the story’s dramatic tension and makes the characters a bit dull. But the book is a light and easy read and the nature of the apocalypse and the sparkling lights and the malodorous apparition is all fun to ponder for as long as it takes to finish reading the novel. This isn’t the kind of book a reader is likely to think about after finishing it, but it makes a good beach read.

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Under the Wave at Waimea by Paul Theroux

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on April 13, 2021

Paul Theroux’s new novel takes as its plot the life of a surfer. For a time, his life seems too superficial to sustain a plot. Joe Sharkey is a high school dropout, a stoner who — apart from a gig in his youth as a lifeguard — has never had a job. Millionaires envy Sharkey, “they wanted his friendship, they praised his life, the life he had made out of accident and desperation and dumb luck, his whole existence a form of escape, fleeing to the water to be himself and protecting himself on land by telling lies about his life.” Sharkey seems mindlessly happy, untroubled because he is disconnected from the ordinary concerns that plague the rest of us. How could such an empty life be interesting? In the literary hands of Theroux, anything is possible.

As the novel begins, Sharkey is 62, still surfing, but battling aches and doubts. He is a legend whose fame and skills are both diminishing. Theroux is 80 and, at least as a writer, has not diminished a bit. The story is about aging, but it is also about atonement and the search for meaning in life. In the novel’s last third, Sharkey’s mindless happiness has become mindful regret. There is more to life than happiness, Theroux reminds us. Under the Wave at Waimea suggest that true happiness can’t be attained without true understanding. “If I don’t know myself,” Sharkey asks near the novel’s end, “how can you possibly know me?”

The story is told in three parts. The first and last take place in Sharkey’s present. The middle of the novel constructs the details of Sharkey’s life. As an Army brat whose father wants him to go to West Point and serve in Vietnam, Sharkey gets kicked out of a private school for smoking weed and refusing to rat out his source. He’s ostracized as a haole in a public school but escapes the bullies by isolating himself on a surfboard. Over the years, building a life from sun and sea, Sharkey wins competitions, gets endorsement contracts, has sex with beach bunnies, and travels the world, never once reading a book or thinking that his life is missing anything worthwhile. He forms a superficial attachment to Hunter Thompson but never troubles himself to read the autographed copy of a book that Thompson gives him. Eventually Sharkey meets Olive, a kind and patient woman who loves Sharkey despite his faults, including his self-absorption, his unthinking failure to make her a meaningful part of his life.

The novel’s first part leads to its defining moment as a buzzed Sharkey, driving in the rain on a dark night while telling Olive a story from his past, hits and kills a homeless bicycle rider. Sharkey tells the cop who shows up that he hadn’t been drinking. The cop, recognizing Sharkey as a legendary surfer, doesn’t seem interested in investigating the death of a homeless man. When Olive presses Sharkey to discuss his role in the death, Sharkey dismisses it as inconsequential, but something about the death changes Sharkey, reduces him, makes him feel his age and steals his motivation to surf. Sharkey’s near drowning and Olive’s miscarriage send the message that a dark cloud is hanging over a life that Sharkey has always regarded as sunny and carefree.

The last part of the novel picks up the story of an unfocused Sharkey who is smoking too much weed and surfing too little, still refusing to acknowledge the importance of killing another human being. Tired of listening to Sharkey respond to her confrontation with “he was a homeless drunk,” Olive embarks on a quest to reconstruct the man’s life. He might have been a homeless drunk when he died, but she learns that he was much more than that during his life. Even in hard times, he was a trusted friend, an inspiration to those who knew him.

The quest takes Olive (with Sharkey in tow) to Arkansas and back to Hawaii, where they meet men who have fallen on hard times, including some Sharkey knew in his childhood. Olive forces Sharkey to add up his life, the life in which he feels so much pride, and stack it up against the remarkable highs and tragic lows of the life made by the man Sharkey dismisses as a “drunk homeless guy.”

Theroux is among the best painters of word pictures. From faces to fingernails, from rocky shores to moonglow on a distant headland that looks like “an outstretched paw,” Theroux’s descriptive prose invites visualization. Hawaii, of course, is a remarkable place to visualize. Theroux captures not just the beaches and waves but the beauty of a culture that values integrity and truth while practicing the ugliness of racial judgment. Sharkey believes that Hawaii’s beauty is pure, that everything ugly about the islands — drugs, shoes, plastic bags, crime scene tape — comes from the mainland. Sharkey only belatedly wonders whether he is part of the ugliness that has contaminated the native purity.

There is a lot to unpack in Under the Waves at Waimea. To some degree, the novel is about white privilege. Sharkey is a haole, scorned by many native Hawaiians until he proves himself as a surfer, but he gets endorsement contracts that better, native surfers never seek. Late in the novel Sharkey is accused of having “snobbed” his native peers. For the most part, the novel is about self-discovery, about the importance of kindness and the need to put aside self-satisfaction to live a truly happy life. But it is also about setting aside judgment, about recognizing the complexity and value of others, about not basing opinions on one sliver of a multi-faceted life. There is some redundancy in Theroux’s effort to make his points — there isn’t much subtlety here — but the points he makes are important and the story is both moving and memorable.

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