The Origin of the Brunists by Robert Coover

 

WASH THE EARTH FROM YOUR HANDS AND FEET, AND CAST YOUR EYES TO THE LIMITLESS STARS!

Webster Schott wrote in his 1966 New York Times review that Coover's novel “begins as an account of the founding of a crackpot religious sect named for an Italian-American coal miner who miraculously survives a mine disaster that kills 98 others." He goes on to say “Mr. Coover takes apart the economy, power structure, social order and sexual codes of a small town berserk with holiness” and then describes how “the Bruno phenomenon cracks open all the hidden nuts in West Condon.” Oh, Webster Schott! Although you may have hit the bullseye, are you using language that could be deemed politically incorrect by today's standards?

The Origin of the Brunists is a much-overlooked classic, a humdinger doozy of a 450-page novel that eerily foresees many aspects of the social climate that have and continue to taint and disrupt life in the US.

It's 1960 or thereabouts and we're in West Condon, a coal mining town in the American Midwest, probably Illinois or Ohio. The novel's Prologue takes place in April, on the very day followers of Giovanni Bruno, the Brunists, assemble at the surviving coal miner's home in preparation for their assent tomorrow to the Mount of Redemption to await the End of the World. There's talk of the Kingdom of Light, illumination, mystic fusion, and transformation. This is the language of the ancient Gnostics; however, for the Brunists, Christian fundamentalists that they are, there's a critical difference separating them from those ancient mystics: they take their religion literally. As one member proclaims to a reporter on the scene, “Nothing that is true is merely figurative.” Each Brunist is taught the secret password, the secret handshake, and other secret signals to keep nonbelievers out of their select circle.

After all the newspaper people leave and the sun goes down, as a sort of prep run, dressed in special white tunics, the Brunists hop in their cars and drive up to the Mount of Redemption near the coal mine, Deepwater Number 9, where all those miners lost their lives due to an explosion back in January. But once they reach their destination and exchange prayers around a fire... a crisis strikes.

Chapter One switches back to that fateful day in January, the morning Number 9 explodes. Robert Coover proves himself master of the craft. These first chapters of the novel propel a reader into what it's like to work as a miner and then, what it's like to struggle and suffer in the face of such a catastrophe when living in a mining town, in this case, the town of West Condon. Turning the pages, I was engrossed and enthralled; I could hardly put the book down.

Regarding the aftermath, as Webster Schott observed, all the hidden nuts of the town are cracked open. Abner Baxter, a hellfire preacher, rails curses against the Brunists when he takes a break from beating his sons and daughters with a leather strap, especially his oldest teenage daughter, Francis. Abner demands that Francis expose her naked ass in front of her mother and younger brothers and sister so all can witness the whippings he administers while spouting quotes from the Bible. Abner's sons, meanwhile, terrorize West Condon, leaving excrement on front porches, kill cats, and even burn a Brunist's house down with their usual signature of the "Black Hand." Town fathers form a Common Sense Committee that contains barely a tiny shred of sense, common or otherwise.

Much of the novel focuses on Justin "Tiger" Miller, who has returned to town to run the local paper, the West Condon Chronicle. During his high school years, Tiger was the star and led the West Condon basketball team to their one and only state championship game. In many respects, Tiger could be judged as the hero of the tale. Tiger even goes underground and joins the Brunists for a time, developing a loving relationship or a sort with Marcella Bruno, the much younger sister of her enigmatic coal miner brother turned mystic leader. Tiger ensures that the Chronicle overflows with lurid, sensationalist accounts and photographs of the Brunists. Does Tiger's reportage fan the flames of the town's current frenzy and madness? You bet it does. Tiger sends his articles off to big city papers. The Brunists eventually capture the attention of a nationwide audience. TV cameras and an army of journalists descend on West Condon, leading up to the date in April set for the End of the World. Robert Coover keenly detects the power of the media in manipulating public opinion that we have witnessed during these past tumultuous years.

The Origin of the Brunists contains none of the author's familiar postmodern, experimental high jinks found in works like Pricksongs & Descants or A Night at the Movies. Nope. In the spirit of Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, and John Dos Passos, this novel is social realism all the way. Here's Robert Coover describing West Condon back in 1933: “West Condon then was a town of intense poverty, of hatred and suspicion, of prohibition gangsterism, of corruption and lawlessness. The mines still operating paid fifty cents an hour at the coalface, and life, at that face was miserable and precarious. Death came quickly and brutally, and families such as the Brunos lived in its shadow. It came by fire, by falling rock and coal, by power and methane explosions, by the crushing impact of mine cars and locomotives, by falls down shafts. Knees swelled, spines were broken, arms were crushed, lungs were scarred, eyes lot their vision.” Coover also delves into the what it was like being an immigrant, belonging to an ethnic and religious minority such as Italian Catholic.

Back on the Brunists. Here's one fanatical member, Eleanor Norton, who claims to repeatedly hear voices from a higher realm speaking to her. A reporter asks Eleanor exactly what the Brunists expect to happen now that today is the day set for the End of the World. Eleanor replies, “We wish to emphasize that the exact . . . content of the Coming of the Light is not known, what precisely it will be or how it will . . . take place. We do know that whatever shape it takes, it will take place today, barring of course unforeseen obstacles caused by the power of darkness.”

And there you have it. The fundamentalist fanatics give themselves an out. They are always absolutely 100% right in their proclamations and predictions; however, they can be undone by those “unforeseen obstacles caused by the power of darkness”. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see a group of frustrated fanatics turning violent against an easy target – the science teacher teaching evolution at their local high school, the couple on the edge of town who are staunch atheists, the liberal, namby-pamby minister of that small church filled with those damn egghead pseudo-intellectuals, the list is endless.

The Origin of the Brunists and its 2014 sequel, The Brunist Day of Wrath, deserve a much wider readership. It's not probable, but if these two novels were to ever become prime reading material for young people in America, I can envision the result – book bans and book burnings wouldn't be far behind.