There are times you don’t like something, but can’t really put your finger on the reason. Take Mexican food. No matter how well it is prepared, how fresh the ingredients, or how wonderful the recipe, it’s all pretty average to me. You can place before me the finest Mexican feast in all the land, and I will respond with a resounding meh. And to the consternation of my wife, who loves Mexican food, I can’t explain the reason why. The other night, I went with some friends to a popular new Mexican place in my neighborhood. After what everyone agreed was an exemplary repast, I received quizzical stares when I declared the establishment to be no better than Taco Bell. That sums up my experience with Stuart O’Nan’s A Prayer for the Dying. It is a well-reviewed book by an underappreciated writer whose previous works I have thoroughly enjoyed. Yet for some reason, not easily diagnosed, it failed to make a dent in my consciousness. When I finished, I beheld the novel as an elegant but impractical artifact: structurally sound, expertly crafted, yet somehow empty, a meaningless exercise. O’Nan is known as a literary shape-shifter. He plays with different genres and archetypes and subtly shapes them to his own ends. He has a gift for taking on a tried-and-true story from an oblique angle. He has used his talents to spin familiar, yet unique stories about missing children, murders, ghosts, and a down-on-its-luck Red Lobster. For all his genre dabbling, O’Nan has a pretty consistent style and template. His books are slim, usually less than three hundred pages. He writes in a spare, understated style, though with a keen eye for precise, telling details. The pages of his novels are shot through with humanism. He is never as interested in plot action as he is in the character reactions to that plot. In Dying, O’Nan, known more for his contemporary settings, takes on historical fiction. The setting is the town of Friendship, Wisconsin, in 1868. It is a place still haunted by the recently-ended Civil War. Friendship is populated with veterans, and the surrounding countryside is still full of wandering soldiers trying to make their ways home. The main character is Jacob Hansen, who holds three jobs: sheriff, pastor, and undertaker. All these jobs are fraught with symbolism, as is just about every other aspect of this story. Following a brief introduction to the town and its citizens, Friendship’s quaint and peaceful existence is shattered by the outbreak of a virulent and deadly epidemic, perhaps borne by those wandering Union soldiers. Jacob and the doctor (helpfully known as Doc) attempt to enforce a quarantine, with varying degrees of success. If that wasn’t bad enough, the woods erupt in flames, and soon a forest fire is surging towards the virus-ridden village. Yep, that’s right. Not one, but two Biblical plagues! Both in less than 200 pages! Now, I’m no literary theorist, but I think that makes Jacob into Job: a man of faith beset by tragedies.The trouble, or perhaps the fear, I’ve always had in openly discussing books (whether in high school English or the Internet) is the uncomfortable sensation that I’m missing some profound point. I don’t want to come off as a slack-jawed yokel who can only read and understand back issues of Guns & Ammo (Though I’m sure my pans of Dostoyevsky and Melville have already marked me as a hopeless philistine). With this novel, I wasn’t sure if I was reading too deep, or not deep enough. The writing is so barebones and skeletal I was inclined to think it was the former, and that any philosophical insights I conjured were the result of projection, rather than authorial intent. However, the evident care and craft taken with Dying has convinced me that O’Nan probably was shooting for a greater resonance than anything I experienced. As I noted above, this isn’t a book that is easy to critique. There is no obvious flaws. There isn’t any hackneyed writing or tone-deaf dialogue or shoddy plotting. To the contrary, I got the sense that everything in Dying was exactly as O’Nan wanted it. In terms of execution, I really believe he put his vision on the page. If I had to put my finger on the source of my disquiet – and I probably should, at this point, instead of stalling and expanding on a tired Mexican food metaphor – it would probably be the yawning distance I sensed between myself and the characters in the story.This distance comes, partially, as a result of O’Nan’s decision to write in the second person. The story is addressed to you, with the reader standing in for the main character, Jacob. The second person is a rare point of view, but in certain situations, it can be really effective at creating a sense of immediacy, of making the reader part of the story. Here, though, I think it does just the opposite. It felt like I was being held at arm’s length. Perhaps this is as much a function of O’Nan’s tone as it is of the point of view he employs. O’Nan’s style has never been vigorous or descriptive. Rather, it is economical, relying on perception and insight rather than a thesaurus and fancy syntax. In Dying, unfortunately, O’Nan’s understated style nearly flat-lines. It is almost deadpan. I mean, there are some wild things that happen in this novel. There is a hijacked train racing a forest fire; there are gruesome deaths from a mysterious illness; there are murders; there is even necrophilia! Essentially, all the elements exist for a shamelessly entertaining summer read. (Is entertaining the word I'm looking for? I'll stick with it, and leave it to the mental health professionals to sort out the rest). O’Nan, though, narrates these goings-on with an unwaveringly moribund voice. He may be describing a man having carnal relations with a corpse, but the tenor of his writing remains appropriate for a treatise on federal estate tax law. There are themes and leitmotifs swirling around A Prayer for the Dying. Questions are raised about good and evil and faith. The trouble with a book like this, marked by its brevity and terseness, is that it only really gets around to raising these questions, rather than expounding upon them or – gasp – attempting an answer or two. It could be that I’m too dumb to understand this book. It’s just as likely that its fans are projecting too much upon its slender spine. In any event, this is a novel that I certainly respect, from an aesthetic standpoint, if no other. On the other hand, it is certainly not a novel I enjoyed.
This is not an easy book to review. On the one hand, I have so much to say about it because it made such a huge impression on me. On the other hand, I don't want to spoil any of the story by saying too much. The book is written in the second person which is not often used in novels, at least none I've read. In this case, Jacob Hansen, survivor of the Civil War before coming to the town of Friendship as sheriff, undertaker, and pastor, is reviewing the events of his life to himself. He feels a tremendous sense of responsibility for what he has achieved during and after his Civil War experience. Because he has faced horrific experiences, he needs to review it all to examine where he faltered, where he did the right thing, and where he did the only thing he could do no matter what the consequences. He spares himself nothing in his judgment of his behavior; his dilemma seems to be whether he can live with what he's had to do even to the point of wondering whether he should live at all. There is a spiritual element to this novel; the story of Job comes to mind. How much can a man take, especially one who very much wants to do the right thing, before he's crushed by circumstances over which he never had any control. For Jacob Hansen there are no easy answers. There's only his faith and his need to do what's right when there's no precedent to guide him through some horrific choices. This was my second time to read this book, and I will probably read it again. It's that outstanding.
What do You think about A Prayer For The Dying (2000)?
A short, intense novel written in the 2nd person. You might describe it as Cormac McCarthy re-writing Camus's The Plague. The 2nd person threw me for a while -- I tend to resist that narrative perspective, especially in a novel -- but you (no pun intended) get used to it.The writing is terse, vivid, and active. The narrative follows the sheriff/undertaker/pastor who first notices a few deaths, which then bloom into an entire epidemic that decimates their small town. Set in Wisconsin shortly after the Civil War. The main character tries to hold things together, to keep the epidemic from spreading, to keep his family safe, and finds himself in the center of a dark vortex that is spiraling out of his control. He is the town pastor, but he has doubts and consistently questions God and the nature of fate.Good story-telling. I'm considering it for my Novel Writing class next Fall semester.
—John Struloeff
Stewart O’Nan’s A Prayer for the Dying may be praised by the literary community, but it’s nothing but dead pages full of dead words to me. Jacob Hansen has recently stepped out of the Civil War and into juggling several roles (that of preacher, sheriff and undertaker) in the small town of Friendship, Wisconsin. However, Friendship soon finds itself trapped in a Catch-22, where they should stay quarantined due to a diphtheria epidemic, yet should be fleeing from the great incoming fire. Jacob struggles with the past horrors in his present circumstance, his responsibility to the town versus his concern for his wife and infant child, and the desire to do good while the choice to do so seems to be slipping away. The book is told in second-person singular (so it’s about what ‘you’ are doing, not what ‘I’ am doing). While many would argue this is basically the same as first-person, I usually take this move as an indication of the need for distance in the narrative, a twist that will yank and contort further away as the ending nears. A Prayer for the Dying doesn’t waste this narrative choice, but it’s one more aspect of the novel that’s boring and predictable in its execution. I’m bored with authors who use Biblical ties in a (failed) attempt to spark intrigue around their use of plagues, natural disasters and crime. I’m bored with secular authors writing pastors losing their faith over familial tragedy (and Christian authors writing pastors regaining their faith in the face of familial tragedy) and O’Nan keeps this boring simplification of faith going. It doesn’t bother me if a character winds up going towards or away from God—it’s going to depend on the character and the storyline—but O’Nan leaves so much of the emotions and thought process out that it falls flat. The ending is boring and predictable, too. It’d be one thing if it were some fatalistic sledgehammer smashing through everything that hopes the blunt object would somehow change its trajectory, but it’s nothing but a final, pathetic tap from a powerless novel. I just read this article the other day about parents who had lost children (I’ll link it in the comments). The father went into his daughter’s room after she was shot to death and pulled an embroidered picture from the wall. He flipped this picture over where it was nothing but threads and said he felt like this was the part he was seeing right now, but that somehow, maybe even naively, he still trusted God to one day have it make sense. Now that’s an interesting take on faith and losing kids, so for fictional efforts to not even try just makes it feel like one more attempt to incorporate larger elements (God, Biblical disasters, etc.) to prop up plot points that haven’t got the weight to stand on their own. It’s so boring that I can’t even be bothered to go find a thesaurus to look up a better word, so boring boring boring it is. Even when the prose is lyrical and well-crafted (and O’Nan’s often is), even with the good scenes (like where Jacob has to board a woman into her home), A Prayer for the Dying didn’t make me feel anything save the desire to quit reading after fifteen minutes at a time. I can think my way through how the parts work, maybe feel smart that I sussed out how the tension and dissonance plays in, but the book has no heartbeat. Not for me. One star, but reaching higher.
—Colin McKay Miller
The paperback cover carries a blurb: “A cross between Stephen Crane and Stephen King.” Maybe. It is a post-Civil War tale in that the protagonist is haunted by his memories of the war, memories that are revealed slowly, then differently. (It’s challenging to write about this one without revealing spoilers—and there’s no good reason to spoil a really good story). But I’ll come back to that quote.It’s told in the second–person, a perspective that requires some accommodation. (Did you know you survived the CW? Did you know you resumed civilian life in the bucolic Friendship, Wisconsin among good friends, mostly good people, and become a man of faith, doing right by everyone, even those who, perhaps, deserved less consideration? Did you know you had an adoring wife, one you also adore, and a beautiful infant daughter? Did you know what a good person you are?) O’Nan makes the second-person narrative work—no easy feat. You participate in the narrative; you’re not allowed to merely observe. You are implicated. Well-done. Rural serenity succumbs to chaos. Memory encounters The Real. The slow country walk becomes the frantic, desperate run. You are caught up, running for your life and from your life. Bravo!Other reviewers have mentioned it, and I’ll second the notion, this novel bears a resemblance to Cormac McCarthy—albeit, Cormac McCarthy-Lite. In no way is that comment an insult to O’Nan; he merely has a different story to tell.To return to that cover blurb—I couldn’t help thinking: this isn’t so much a Crane/King story, although it might be—I’m too unfamiliar with King to make the comparison. Instead, I had this nagging feeling, initially, that I was reading Marilynne Robinson—a story begun by MR and finished by Cormac McCarthy. Could you ask for a more unlikely combo?
—Mike Puma
