The Brunist Day of Wrath by Robert Coover

 


They're back!

It's 1965, and the Brunists have set up camp on the outskirts of West Condon, near their now famous Mount of Redemption. Five years prior, captured on nationwide TV, the drama of the blessed End of the World had turned into a blood-spattered fiasco, and the Brunists found themselves either hauled away to the loony bin or locked up in jail for a time before being kicked out of town.

Robert Coover told an interviewer that he had always intended to write a sequel to his 1966 novel, The Origin of the Brunists, but he hesitated since such a project would require many years of hard work, and social realism wasn't the primary way he wanted to create fiction. However, after witnessing the rise and popularity of George W. Bush, a US president who actually brought evangelical religion into the political sphere, he knew the time was right.

The Brunist Day of Wrath, published in 2014, is a 1,000-page ripsnorter, a novel I found so compelling and gripping, I could hardly put the book down. I'm a slow reader but I eagerly kept turning the pages and finished this doorstop in nine days. Robert Coover smoothly shifts between dozens of his characters, inhabiting the hearts and guts of women, men, and children who form the now vastly expanded Brunist faithful. Likewise, those townsfolk who have remained in West Condon, even though the town is decidedly more shabby and rundown since the coal mine, the main source of employment, was shut down following the explosion that left 97 miners dead. Additionally, a number of new players make their way on the scene.

There's plenty of drama, ranging from the tragic and heart-wrenching to the absurd and comic, with a good chunk of the comic sliding into farce. Surely, the most interesting character is young Sally Elliott, a college student home for the summer. She wears her long hair in tangles, dirty jeans, and scruffy t-shirts featuring sayings of her own making, such as FAITH IS BELIEVING WHAT YOU KNOW AIN'T SO. Sally even has a stash of grass. As her friend Tommy, the good-looking son of a community leader and the owner of the town's bank, observes, "She went off to some dinky liberal arts college where they taught her to dress like a tramp." With Sally, we're given hints of what will become the sixties counter-culture – hippies, Haight-Ashbury, Woodstock.

And Sally is an aspiring writer, constantly taking notes and penning caustic remarks in her notebook. 'There's only now. And when that's insupportable, there isn't even that. The hardest thing in life is to face the fact of nothingness without a consoling fantasy: at the brink, no way back, unable to jump. The only thing left is to grow up.' Ah, Sally's words and philosophy are worthy of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Zen masters... and Robert Coover.

Lem, the auto mechanic, refers to the Brunists as "those evangelical wackos out at the church camp." Tommy tells Sally that's the prevailing opinion of his dad and the folks in West Condon, that the Brunists are all nuts. Sally replies, "Yeah, well, they're all nuts in here, too, and he hasn't figured that out yet." This exchange is key. Sally is, in effect, echoing Eckhart Tolle when he states, "Thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence." The accuracy of this observation becomes painfully clear in a culminating scene toward the end of the novel.

As for the Brunists at their camp, they are far from being one big harmonious family. Clara Collins, the leader of the faithful, repeatedly emphasizes to those around her that their campsite is meant solely for worship and administration; it was never intended for members to actually live there. However, her instructions are being ignored. Hundreds of Brunists from around the country swarm in, setting up their tents and trailers on the grounds, overflowing into a nearby housing development, which leads to various sanitary and other issues. Furthermore, the vast majority of these individuals are poverty-stricken, either having never possessed anything to begin with or having sold their belongings to make the journey, with the expectation of being raptured up to heaven soon.

At one point, Sarah Collins, the daughter of Clara, is gang-raped in a wooded area of the camp. One of the leading Brunists, their major financial backer, believes that Sarah must, by choice or fate, be an agent of the dark side. Therefore, her being raped must have either been deserved or at least necessary. What! Can you, the reader, believe such twisted, cruel logic? Yet, such is the tenor of the Brunists' reasoning: if you don't believe exactly what we believe, or if bad things happen to you, you are aligned with the powers of darkness. Talk about being trapped by the stories we create for ourselves – a phenomenon Sally (and indirectly Robert Coover) underscores throughout the novel.

The stories we create for ourselves, the dangers and potential for destruction extend well beyond the Brunist camp. To note just two from the pages of Coover's novel: a Presbyterian minister drops his conventional role and wanders in and around West Condon, thinking himself to be Jesus Christ. Additionally, one of the sons of a fire-breathing Brunist preacher heads up a motorcycle gang he calls 'The Wrath of God,' preparing his gang with rifles and dynamite at the ready to extract Godly revenge and retribution.

And what do the Brunists think of Sally? When Sally makes her appearance in the camp, many members take her for the Antichrist, but Clara judges her “just a spoiled unkempt brat with more book learning than is good for her.”

Which brings us to today's prevailing cultural (or lack of culture) in the US. Robert Coover could envision where George W. Bush's combining Christian fundamentalism with politics could lead. What these present-day Brunist-like folks, drowning in TV stupor, booze, meth, and/or oxycontin, hate is books and education—anything that threatens their stultifying worldview. But, hey, the way they see it, they have God on their side.


American author Robert Coover, born 1932