A Sheriff, a Pastor, an Undertaker--Gloaming in a Wisconsin Summer

Silence, Silence. There was no other way I could end this novel. With every question resolved and yet still looming, with every horror extinguished and yet still ringing, the narrator in Stewart O'Nan's A Prayer for the Dying is left only to accept his own futile insanity. Carried on a probing journey of terror and tenderness, the reader is confronted directly with his own mortality, his own anxieties, his own powerlessness.

Set in quite Friendship Wisconsin shortly after the Civil War, A Prayer of the Dying is the story of Jacob Hansen, the town sheriff, pastor and undertaker, whose only purpose in the life is to watch over and attend to his people. As an all purpose civil servant for a disparate community, including everything from the spiritual colonists of the Wisconsin woods to simple, hardworking farm families Jake struggles to care for and understand everyone. Added to his cares is the livelihood of his own small family, and it is from his passion to love and protect all these people that the insanity grows.

"It's a horror novel, It's sick," explained O'Nan candidly at a book signing last Tuesday.

Friendship is hit with a sudden, unexplainable epidemic. The frightful disease gnaws through the community and as confusion and fear engulf the people, their troubles are compounded by a prairie fire that threatens to incinerate the town.

Jake must decide how to comfort and save his people, both physically and spiritually, as he listens to the town bell toll death by the hour.

The first striking aspect of O'Nan's novel is his language. I read the first paragraph four times, allowing ample time for the luscious, vivid imagery to soak through my bones. But the intensity of the novel is apparent from the beginning: the heat and weight of the lazy summer mood push the edges and demand release. From the beginning, the reader feels the hidden furnace of madness churning and knows instinctively that, if all is so plodding and weary to start, something dramatic must be brewing.

But what truly involves the reader with Jake is O'Nan's arresting use of second person. "You like it like this, the bright languid days," the narrator instructs immediately. The reader watches Friendship through Jake's eyes; he smells death through Jake's nose. He contemplates hell through Jake's fears.

When asked why he chose the second person, O'Nan explained, "I had the feel, the mood of the book for two or three years." But when he tried the first and the third person, they felt "clumsy," "The author steps in too much," he commented.

According to O'Nan, the second person was originally just used for "bad guys...But people aren't bad. They're just very questioned. This guy is good. It brings the reader closer to him. He will sacrifice anything." O'Nan recognized the abruptness of his style but felt the overall intensity and involvement was worth confusing his reader for the first 30 pages. The reader's discomfort and anxiety concerning the epidemic are profoundly enhanced by the voice, by his lack of freedom of thought. His thoughts are Jake's, so just as Jake is helpless against the disease and unable to rescue his loved ones, so too is the reader unable to help Jake and, instead, grows in insanity with him.

The book has an estranging, weird effect. Jake is so responsible he's driven to madness. At the same time, this madness is his own salvation and the salvation of the world.

Jake is torn. It's a fight between withdrawal into the self, which is sterile and useless, and being the center of the community. I don't know how he resolves it. In the end, he believes in some way. He's not quite sure, but he knows he can't force grace to work.

A Prayer for the Dying hits direct about faith and religion, not subtly or from behind. As O'Nan remarks, "Thematically it's precisely the same as all my other books. It's always about hope and despair." Because the reader senses only through Jake, he hears Jake's internal question explicitly.

O'Nan leaves his reader asking himself. "You're not sure anymore, are you?" Almost all certainties have been tossed aside. The good have gone bad; all efforts have failed. Yet there is hope, there is reassurance. "Hell is yourself, in a way." O'Nan explains. "So you always want to go back to the ones you love."

Through the insanity the reader is asked to return and to love once again, even if that love is the madness.