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Executive Times |
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2005 Book Reviews |
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Mission
to America by Walter Kirn |
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Rating: •• (Mildly Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Isolation At times, Walter Kirn’s
new novel, Mission
to America, is funny, satiric, and enjoyable. At other times, the
characters seem stale, one-dimensional and the plot becomes boring. A
religious sect, the Aboriginal Fulfilled Apostles (AFA), isolated in Bluff, Montana,
has soaked up its gene pool and sends two missionaries to the America outside
Bluff, which they call “Terrestria,” to find
converts to bring home to Bluff. Kirn’s own
isolated family was converted by door-to-door Mormon missionaries, and some
of the better parts of this novel probably draw on that experience. Predictably,
the young missionaries become distracted by some of the alluring aspects of Terrestria. At his best, Kirn
profiles characters with precision and catches some details that are pitch
perfect. Unfortunately, the characters fail to develop enough for readers to
care much about what happens to them. Here’s an excerpt, from Chapter Two,
pp. 35-42: Even after seven days in
the van, my partner and I were still learning about “I’m eating your
next-to-last wing,” he said. “Also, I’m switching to news. We need to pay
more attention to the news.” “Why is that?” “The worse it gets, the
better the chance they’ll give us a fair hearing.” “That’s a mean thing to
wish. The news is bad already.” “It’s hard to tell. We
don’t know what they’re used to.” I pricked the plastic tube
of whitener open with its pointed cap. The instruction sheet promised results
that you could see in only fourteen days, but I hoped to cut this to seven by
applying a thick double coating. I couldn’t wait two weeks. Women who struck
me as fine potential mates were already passing me by without a look. They
seemed to sense it when I looked at them, though, and yesterday one had
reached into her bag as if for some instrument of self-defense. “They’re broadcasting a
hostage difficulty. “Once I’m done in here.” “Should I whiten my teeth,
too?” “That’s up to you.” “Why don’t I stay natural
and you go whiter and whoever has more luck in meeting people, he’ll be the
leader. We need to choose a leader.” “You go ahead. You’re
older.” “You’re clearer headed.” Elder Stark was being
disingenuous. He knew that he’d been in command since we set out and that he
had no intention of yielding power. How he’d assumed control I wasn’t
certain. I only knew that the first time we’d bought gasoline he’d insisted
on premium, for better mileage, and that was that—the pattern was set. Next
he was pointing out which passersby we should try to talk into taking the
Well-being Quiz and which ones we should allow to meet their fates. “My mom had a man she
counseled who took a hostage once. He dreamed it before he did it,” Elder
Stark said. “He tied ‘in his wife with twisted plastic trash bags to keep her
from leaving him for another man, then locked her in a shed behind the house
while his neighbors searched the woods. After a week he set her free and she
refused to report him. They’re still together. That tying her up with trash
bags did the trick.” “This happened in Bluff? I
never heard a word.” “It happened when we were
little. You’ve heard of ‘angel babies’?” “Never.” “They’re the newborns who
don’t come out right. The Church owns a house in “Stop it.” “I heard about them through
the wall.” “You make stuff up,” I
said. “It isn’t that funny. A lot of it’s danged disgusting.” “Say it: ‘damned.’” When he bantered this way,
out of sight, without direction, I knew what Elder Stark was really doing.
He’d unhitched his belt. One hand was in his underwear. It had happened after
lights-out in the van on our second night and again the following night. I’d
done it, too. An agreement took shape. We could carry on as we pleased in our
own bunks as long as we spared each other the sights and sounds. I dipped a small wand into
the plastic tube, drew back my lips so they wouldn’t spread saliva, and
covered my incisors and bicuspids with a layer of bleachy-tasting
gel. The tooth discoloration was due to diet, and
particularly the “strong digestives” such as anise jelly and sweetened pine
pitch that we took after heavy fatty meals. The results of this regimen, for
me and others, were clear, unusually elastic skin, urine that sometimes
smelled strongly of burning leaves, and tooth enamel scored by hairline
etchings that I feared were the beginnings of ruinous cracks. Eating as Adam
was thought to have was perilous, but at least it
warded off the bloating that I was suffering from that night. “They’re saying there’s no sign of life
inside the clinic. It’s over. The SWAT team is taking off its breastplates. I
feel like we should go back to the lobby and give that poor girl with the
cross another chance.” “This stuff needs to sit on my teeth
for fifteen minutes.” “Shiny beautiful teeth look strange on
men. That blond guy in “I’ll stop before that.” “Come watch with me. I’m lonesome.” “So sleep, then. Turn it off.” “I can’t,” he said. “I’m lonesome
without it. I don’t know how that happened.” “I do.” “How?” “It’s hard to put it into
words. You forget how quiet it was before, or something. The quiet scared
you, but you didn’t know it. After you turn off the screen, you know it,
though.” “We’ve never turned it
off.” “It’s a prediction.” Lonesomeness was a problem
with Elder Stark. I’d known him before as a schoolmate and a Church friend
but I’d only grown close to him during the last few training seminars, after
we’d moved into Lauer’s house so we could spend more time practicing being
Person One. I’d learned that my new friend couldn’t sleep in stretches longer
than two hours due to nightmares, and sometimes, in the middle of the night,
waking up on my bunk in the makeshift basement dormitory, I’d hear him
sucking cough drops or crunching almonds as though trying to drown out
troubling thoughts. A few times I heard him talking to himself in a croaky
old man’s voice. I got the tones and the rhythms but not the words. When I
asked Elder Stark about this in the morning his face tightened up and he told
me I’d been dreaming. A few hours later he confessed, “The Hobo paid me a
visit. He keeps me company. Was he being critical or kind?” I told him the
voice sounded very faintly critical and asked him what the Hobo looked like,
afraid to ask him how real the Hobo was. “He wears an old floppy
hat. It shades his face. I made him up when I was five or six to look in a
barn I was scared of going into for a cat I’d lost.” “The Hobo went in and you
stayed outside?” I said. “No. He made fun of me for
being scared until I had something to prove. We went together. Afterward, he
clapped me on the back and I felt prouder than I ever had, so I asked him to
stay. He promised to pop in sometimes. My mother told me when I was twelve,
once I was old enough to understand, that I didn’t really invent him, either.
She used to see him standing over my crib. The same floppy hat. You probably
have one, too. She told me most boys in Bluff do.” “I don’t have one.” “Maybe a sea pirate or a
cattle rustler?” “Why are these types all
vagabonds or crooks? Do they have to be?” “They just always are.” I let the gel dry and
watched the nighttime interstate out the recessed, cell-like bathroom window.
Each car and truck represented another soul out of reach of our influence,
lost to its true nature. Growing up, it had always bothered me how easily we
consigned non-AFAs to lives of dissatisfaction and
insignificance. The universe pivoted on our heads solely, even though we’d
just recently organized ourselves. The older I grew and the more I read, the
more confusing it all seemed. How could a settlement tucked up in the woods
at the edge of the power grid and the zip code system have a bigger lever to
shift history than the millions of people who voted for the government,
farmed the Great Plains, and administered the markets? “How white are they?” Elder
Stark asked me from the bedroom. His voice had brightened; he must have
finished his business. With me it took forever, but he was quick. I bared my teeth in the
mirror: no improvement. Besides a nice smile, I wanted some other things. A
suntan that didn’t end partway up my arms and at my collar line. Hair that
poked up a little, or puffed out, and didn’t just lie sideways and dead flat.
My mother had always told me I was handsome, and compared to the boys in
Bluff I might have been, but within a few hours of leaving I discovered that
they weren’t much to judge by. Framed in the windshields of the cars we
passed were young male heads so symmetrical and pleasing I feared that Lauer
had underestimated the degradation of our physical stock. My partner showed
no sign of such concerns, though, and I couldn’t very well bring them up
without insulting his own appearance. “No whiter,” I said. “I’m glad I didn’t bother
then.” “You’re supposed to be
patient. It’s a gradual change.” “Maybe I’ll reconsider if I
notice it. Right now, my brother, I think you bought a lie.” There were still a few
things to do before I slept. The training course had taught us to end our
days by swallowing a one-ounce dropper of filbert oil as prescribed in our
six-page manual, “The Alchemy of Evangelism,” which also included a recipe
for mouthwash made of melon-rind juice and muckweed
pulp. The nut oil was thought to condition our vocal cords and cause them to
resonate at secret frequencies that listeners would find calming and
appealing. The next step was to gargle with the mouthwash, which was said to
ward off canker sores. Finally, we were told to shut our eyes for a five- or
ten-minute Thought Retreat during which we were urged to picture a belt of
pink radiation swaddling the earth and neutralizing its poisons and
malignancies. I sat on the edge of the
tub and did the exercise. It had originated forty years ago in response to a
pleading letter to the Seeress—the current Seeress’s predecessor, who we called Swift Aunt Patricia,
because we rename them when they’re dead so we don’t confuse them with the
reigning ones—from the Peruvian Minister of Health, a secret longtime
subscriber to Luminaria, the monthly AFAjournal
of ideas that our leaders hinted was widely read, in secret, by enlightened
powerful outsiders. According to the minister’s letter, northern That very day, the story
went, she sent her staff home early, fed her birds, and shut herself up in
the Blossom Room of Riverbright, the turreted
official residence that Mother Lucy had sketched while she lay dying but
failed to render the rear side of, causing its builders to leave it flat and
windowless because early Apostles were strict abstainers from what Discourses calls the Bridegroom’s
Folly, defined as trying to guess another’s desires in the absence of
unmistakable evidence. (We grew less stringent about this as the years
passed.) She prayed in the time-honored manner of her office, kneeling on an unplaned cedar plank, her feet unshod, her
right palm open and up, her left palm flat across her forehead. After three
sleepless days and several Etheric Contacts with Lom-Bard-Ok-Thon, the virility entity of the Pyramids,
Swift Aunt Patricia discerned a trembling radiance around the globe atop her
desk. The glow turned rose-colored, intensified, and hovered over Such stories were hard to
credit, yet I cherished them. What I couldn’t imagine was telling them to
strangers, even though I had little else to offer them. Ours was a church of
tales, I’d come to realize, and we accorded anecdotes and gossip a higher
place than formal doctrine, which we didn’t really trust. It was no wonder
our movement had failed to spread. Unless you grew up with us, soaking up the
lore, how could you hope to understand or join us? It was all so sloppy, so
disheveled, a huge loose stack of fables and fourth-hand yarns clipped to a
modest sheaf of creeds with a lot of health advice tossed in. Religious
satire can be particularly hard to pull off in our pluralistic society. The
clash of cultures that Kirn presents in Mission
to America looks like everyday life in those parts of Steve Hopkins,
November 21, 2005 |
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ã 2005 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the December 2005
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Mission
to America.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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