The Origin of the Brunists

by Robert Coover

Robert Coover. The Origin of the Brunists. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, [1966]. First edition. Signed by the author. Octavo. 441 pages.

Genres: Fiction, American, Literature, Novels, Religion, Literary Fiction, Horror

441 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Robert Lowell Coover was an American novelist, short story writer, and T. B. Stowell Professor Emeritus in Literary Arts at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction. He became a proponent of electronic literature and was a founder of the Electronic Literature Organization.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

What does it take to invent a new religion? The recipe is rather simple – you need a good share of stupidity, a handful of psychos and crazies and a lot of hype and mass hysteria…

Miller perceived existence as a loose concatenation of separate and ultimately inconsequential instants, each colored by the actions that preceded it, but each possessed of a small wanton freedom of its own. Life, then, was a series of adjustments to these actions and, if one kept his sense of humor and produced as many of these actions himself as possible, adjustment was easier.

The Origin of the Brunists has urgency and dynamics of reportage and Robert Coover is pitiless or even cynical in telling his story so the novel finally becomes the blackest human comedy.

She folded the newspaper under her arm and clanked a nickel onto the counter. “Happy end of the world,” she said softly, and left.

With a due care, even the end of the world can be utilized… Why not? “When in hell, do as the damned do.”

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Left Behind

It was Grace that taught my heart to fear
And Grace my fear relieved-

The town of West Condon, “a mote on the fat belly of the American prairie,” like grace, is inescapable. It, like God, “is utterly remote from anything human.” The place traps its inhabitants, mainly underground, with no hope except in either religion or beer. Located in the approximate centre of the continent, the place is America in microcosm: a country of continuous competitive tension with one’s neighbors, one’s colleagues, often one’s family members, to survive - psychologically as well as physically. In youth, there is high school basketball and its compulsory competitive rituals which create common tribal lore and a minimal shared history. In adulthood, there is only the mine, a dark purgatorial realm in which status and power have nothing to do with the lessons of youth. The competition there is deadly real and unrelenting in ways never prepared for above ground. The men who go down the pits, and their families, live two parallel lives, one superficially conventional, the other hidden and mostly hideous.

The competition and alienation between the worlds defined by religion/beer and above/below are maintained until communal disaster - an explosion in Deepwater Number 9 - overcomes the American ideology of social independence, male machismo, and individual responsibility. Then the world becomes both sentimentally emotional and apocalyptically spiritual at a stroke. Mass death causes a halt in normal relationships. Acute feelings of vulnerability become common currency. The bars and the churches are the primary beneficiaries, where the currency gets spent. Grief and existential angst are mitigated in one; portents of the Second Coming are joyously anticipated in the other. Christian fundamentalists, psychics, numerologists, Tarot readers, spiritualists, gnostic pessimists and mystical optimists (but not Islamists, being unknown at that time in that place) unite against the demonic forces of ignorant indifference. Disaster, paradoxically, revives the American Dream of universal (or at least white), unlimited (or at least relative) salvation.

These are people “with sweeping world views that made cosmic events out of a casual gesture or a cloud’s idle passage.” Their response to collective tragedy is part of the legacy of pioneers in the American wilderness. The mine itself is a concrete reminder of the long-lost wilderness in its attractiveness to immigrants whose sons and daughters populate the place. Even more, the mine remains as wild, as volatile, and as unpredictable as the weather. The impending violence of the coal face is the frontier extended underground. It has an overwhelming power beyond their control that rules their lives. The mine is an avatar of the Old Testament Yahweh - arbitrary, decisive, and subject to no appeal. It is only right therefore that these people worry since “worry is the universal dread tempered by hope.”

But the commonality of worry does not imply a sharing of worry. Each West Condoner is on his own. The Italians, the Germans, the Slovaks, the Spanish, the Catholics, the Baptists consider each other inimical. Every group has its own racism, cults and loyalties; these are necessary for psychic as well as physical survival. Without them there is no protection from the Other. But when “God’s fist had closed on the mine-hive and shook it.” there is at least a show of community, of pulling together, a suspension of the tribal mistrust which lies just below the surface of American civility. The eponymous Bruno, raised from the dead after three days in the nether world and presiding over the establishment of his church a Pentecostal seven weeks later, is neither spiritual nor a competent mine worker. But he is close enough to being Christ (or, this is America after all, an alien from some other dimension) to serve as a symbol of solidarity... and of course as scapegoat.

The intersection of the saints and sinners in West Condon is Miller, the owner of the failing town’s failing newspaper. All he sees in Bruno is “a browbeaten child turned ego-centered adult psychopath.” Miller had escaped - to university, to the city, to a society of change - but was lured back by a big fish in small pond ‘opportunity.’ He has to remain civil with everyone to do his job, but his dual nationality, as it were, means that no one trusts him entirely. As the maker and breaker of self-images, as well as reputations, he has power. Miller is a game-player. He knows that all news is fake news to somebody - the mine owners, the wire service reporters, the local religious enthusiasts, the drunks and petty politicians. Reality is whatever spin he decides to create. All fear this power; but all feed it, hoping to share in it.

This makes Miller as trapped as anyone else. He belongs. People listen to his views. His identity has become what has been given to him by his fellow-citizens. And, because of his job and experience, he is the link to the rest of the world, a short of Charon who patrols the River Styx, attracting the attention of the world at large to this insular and debilitating place, and carrying it external views of itself. He becomes a political figure when he inadvertently creates a coalition of the saved and the damned and represents it to the world. The power of fake news.

I am surprised that I have found no one in literary circles who has twigged to the parallels with the rise of Donald Trump. If my guess is correct, the cultural conditions that Coover intuited in the 1960’s are precisely those that led 60 years later to the rise of the Deplorables - the largely uneducated ex-urban population, serving in fast-food peonage, inheritors of bad genes and worse teeth, hooked on booze or oxycodone, and one paycheck from utter penury - as a political force in the land. Coover saw the potential connection between the Evangelicals and this dis-enfranchised under-class: The New Heartland with deep roots in the settlement of the continent. The narrative doesn’t write itself, but when it does get written it is responded to enthusiastically.

The connection among the disparate inhabitants of this heartland is, of course, the extreme tendency to believe one’s own press as the only one that isn’t fake: “their canonical faith in their own private ways to truth.” In other political systems religious enthusiasts form minority parties, allowing participation in coalition governments. This is infeasible in America. Elsewhere in the world, the working poor might join communist or socialist parties. In America this is not an option. But the discovery of their commonality, essentially their insistence on the partiality and corruption of ‘the system,’ gives them, the immoderately pious and those left behind in the progress of capitalism, formidable political power. Each faction in this coalition recognises the irrationality of its alliance with the others. But as so many have pointed out during the era of Trumpism, ‘they don’t care.’ Messianism has never been a rational undertaking; and neither has popular insurrection.

It seems to me that Coover has continued the tradition of Theodore Dreiser and John dos Passos, among others, who understood the dynamics of discontent and resentment inherent in American society. The myth of an unlimited future - economic, political, sociological - inhibited taking this discontent and resentment seriously. Essentially that myth has now been debunked. The future looks as grim as the present. Call it the End Times or Revolution, religious ideology combined with economic desperation packs a punch. And the punch destroys much of current society. But ‘They don’t care.’ They have grace. God is with them. They are “victims of transcendence.”

[Glenn Russell]

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 of 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 lost 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.


American author Robert Coover, born 1932 - photo taken about the time when he wrote the novel

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

While reading this novel it occured to me on more than one occasion that I was very happy that this wasn't the first Coover book I'd read. This work is so very different than his fairy tale making-and-breaking works that require new maps to navigate his fictional terrain; The Origin of the Brunists is a story told in a Coover voice unfamiliar taking those other works into account - and yet charged with enough voltage to remind the reader that everything here is third rail. By the last 20 pages of the novel I wasn't sure which of us was donning the dynamite laden vest. This book eviscerated everything Americana with such scalpel precision it seemed that there was no option other than the hair trigger detonator tripping and taking everything with it - reader, author, American culture and any second act. That Coover continued on after its publication in 1966 to write more novels - and then return to the subject matter to publish a 1,000+ page sequel 48 years later is an achievement so monumental it is difficult for me to really comprehend, having now finished the first book and being so affected by it.

Such an important book. A shame that here on GR it has less than 300 reads. I cannot recommend it strongly enough.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

The origins of Cooverism are obscure. Its origins are obscured in the manner of having no predictive power of what is to come; it is not a V to its Gravity’s Rainbow, more The Floating Opera to its LETTERS. With the exception of a single fantastic chapter depicting a drunken card game we experience no linguistico-verbal pyrotechnics. We have no flavor of 1960’s postmodernism, the thing Coover made happen. Nothing metaphictional beyond the minimal quantity present in all fiction. The strange thing is that this Master of satire, of the reclamation of our fables, fairytales, and fictions, has a first novel which reads very much like a competently and talentedly written bit of genre fiction; I’m thinking of some of the science fiction of the era with a religious theme, something like Walter Miller’s fantastic A Canticle for Leibowitz or the terribly disappointing Stranger in a Strange Land from Robert Heinlein.

Be that all as it may. We enjoyed it. And but its function today is no longer to stand on its own 534 pages of Bantam mass market paperback, the physical shape of which brought it even closer in my experience back to those pulp sci-fi books I thought I liked back in my youth. The function of The Origin of the Brunists today is as prequel to the forthcoming monster volume of Cooverism, The Wrath of the Brunists [pre-order yours today]. The stuff of Origin, filtered through nearly 50 years of Cooverism grown into maturity and perhaps senility too, promises a fantastic piece of something or other. But just imagine the religious material he has to work with today, all the past five decades, a short slice of religious history which can perhaps only be properly phictionalized by Coover himself. You’ve still got some time :: Prepare the way for the Wrath of the Brunists.

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Miller perceived existence as a loose concatenation of separate and ultimately inconsequential instants, each colored by the actions that preceded it, but each possessed of a small wanton freedom of its own. Life, then, was a series of adjustments to these actions and, if one kept his sense of humor and produced as many of these actions himself as possible, adjustment was easier.

Coover's work deserves more than ten stars, the awe of all the hardscrabble GR Fallen, and will undoubtely serve as an inestimable strategic advantage over those wiry Barth types and their yachting. How Yar!

Coalmine tragedy breeds New Faith in LBJ Pennsylvania: hijinks readily ensue. The range of characters employed is astonishing as are their hopeful paths to redemption. Most of the travellers are misshaped and insect-ridden and yet they hope. There's something human in all that. Coover allows them lusts and gimmicks without a surfeit of information dumps. There is a heady type who can connect the dots but is helpless to extricate himself from his libidinal Road to Damascus. Everything unfolds with a curious precision. Now, I await the arrival of the sequel.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent. Does not need a review from me, as plenty exist already. Interestingly was much more about the lostness of the disenfranchised, poor, high-unemployment etc community as a "why" than about satirizing religious cults than expected, which is a good thing.

*********


From the official statement made by The Family of Love (previously known as "The Children of God") in the 80s:

"In part as a response to the sexual liberality of the early '70s, Father David presented a more intimate and personal, voluntary form of evangelism, which became known as 'Flirty Fishing' or 'FFing.' ...Father David proposed that the boundaries of expressing God's love to others could at times go beyond just showing kindness and doing good deeds. He suggested that for those who were in dire need of physical love and affection, even sex could be used as evidence to them of the Lord's love. ... The motivation, guiding principle, and reasoning behind the FFing ministry was that through this sacrificial proof of love, some would better accept and understand God's great love for them. The goal was that they would come to believe in and receive God's own loving gift of salvation through His Son, Jesus, who gave His life for them. By this unorthodox method David felt many would find the Lord's love and salvation, who never would have otherwise."

Here is one of David's missives from 1980 on the subject of sex (and note the groovy cover art).

http://www.xfamily.org/index.php/The_...

Of course, on a more serious note, it remains important that recordings like the following exist:

https://archive.org/details/ptc1978-1...

Jonestown remains a fascinating (and horrifying, and deeply sad) story, not least because we have so much detail out there to consider.

[Rick Harsch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinary look at lunacy and lord lovelry, yet a mere 441 pages, while the 'sequel' is 1000 pages. What can I conclude? Read the sequel. I am now doing so.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

An easy 5. Perhaps, more to come...or not.

[Simon Robs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ever heard of the Cobden Appleknockers? Doubt it, but betcha they are figured in half way to make up 'West Condon the location where this straight-up told story takes place and West Frankfort, IL the sight of a coal mine explosion in 1951 the other half. It's southern Illinois where Coover came of age, is backward and peckish wholly persuadable to religious fanaticism that grounds this tale. He's got his characters down zand spins a broody web of occult and cultish intrigue with some small town sex & politics to boot. Brings it all off too!

[sologdin · Rating 4 out of 5]

During the mine disaster that is the proximate cause of the formation of the eponymous cult, several miners “considered bratticing off” (48)—building a partition for self-preservation. The significance herein however arises when the cultists are “attacked on one side by violent powers of darkness, reviled on the other by a thickening mass of ignorance and prejudice, and even, as some feared, threatened from within by subversive or weakhearted elements” (294). They decide in response “to brattice themselves off, to retire entirely from public view” – explained by a miner as “when something goes off […] your first impulse is to beat it for the nearest exit. But you can’t tell from where you are just where it happened, and you may end up running right into the middle of the worst of it. It’s almost usually better to find you a safe place, wall it up, and wait there” (id.).

The brattice is likely the controlling protocol of reading for this text, as it sets up the rule by which undecidabilities are to be liquidated: wall up & wait. This is a quarantine principle, described aptly in Discipline and Punish, say, the political dream of the plague, discussed at length perhaps in our review of Love in the Time of Cholera. Sometimes the bratticing will not work, such as when someone is “cruelly penetrated by the prophetic vision” (98).

The title promises an ‘origin,’ the arche that simultaneously commences & commands, as per professor Derrida. The outwork prologue skips over the origin, however, and lands us at the telos, “the End of the World” (13)—so it’s anachronicity ab initio. Normally arche is bratticed away from telos, but here they are cruelly penetrated by the same prophetics. The entire novel, as a long prolepsis, is an example of the cruel penetration of normal narrative progression, a rhetorical bratticing that is more honored in the breach. All that is solid melts into air for the fundamentalist, who watches the bratticing of the past cruelly penetrated by history’s unfailing development. And we are told “worry is the universal dread tempered by hope, prolepsis of pleasure and pain alike” (336), emotional bratticing cruelly penetrated. But this is the way it must be, for “chaste in principle, he seeks lecherous solace in the act of love” (355)—moral bratticing as always already cruelly penetrated.

Outworks functions to identify the antagonists: “the evil brought upon them by the hateful infiltrator” (a journalist) (17) and a “coalminer who had arrogated the local Nazarene pulpit" (a leftwing priest) (18). Latter had been involved in “IWW riots” and “tended to muddle his old political vocabulary with the saints-and-demons gloss of the local holy rollers, but the message was still fermented in the same tortured bowels” (58). Nevertheless, impoverishment as conjoined to fundamentalism: “I lost my own home” (14); they’d "never have to fret these long layoffs again” (148). That’s not the only response, of course, as others believe in the socialist “eventual redistribution of all property equally to all people” (163). This occurs: “they are all selling everything they own and sharing the money as a single community” (331). Purity of doctrine bratticed away from property, commerce, and the modern world. In this connection, the text deploys illiberal objections to the mine disaster insofar as blame falls upon those “committin’ greed and avarice, to go on workin’ for money” (88)—“ruthless avarice of the mine owners” (95).

In the same context, it's not surprising to see some lumpenized antisocial nihilist happenings outside of LAN fundamentalism, such as brother and sister: “nobody was around to notice, so they went upstairs, joking and feeling a little like dumb kids. In bed, she played with him a little, but he couldn’t get it up, it just wasn’t any good, so they laughed and dropped off to sleep, and then they both woke up in the middle of the night, humping away to beat hell” (38). Permissible consanguinity normally brattices away these cruel penetrations--not so much among the lumpenized antisocial nihilist.

Part of town is “strangely unaffected by the disaster that had rocked its very underpinnings” (124), which is an etymological solicitation, i.e., in the derridean sense. We know that the foundation has been shaken in its entirety because the center of the town has been seized by the disaster, as “the mine, this town’s life, its essence, our town […] blew up” (65). The mine is the town, a supplemental logic, surely. The town itself has plainly demarcated boundaries, its very own bratticing, insofar as “what was an exhilarating crispness in town became a bitter cold at its edge” (124)—a limit of the margin as against the center. This disaster is merely a reiteration, however: “The pattern is always the same in these gassy mines […] an accumulation of methane, ignition, usually by sparks off faulty machinery or by smoking, the explosion confined or extended in scope, depending on the effectiveness of the rock dusting” (136). The text might describe the iterability and therefore fungibility of the mine/town as “endless reiteration of sundered instants, grounded in the subject’s abject nature” (139). But the bratticing of the edge of town, the division of center/margin is of course cruelly penetrated where “indications of [town] can be seen a couple miles outside of town” (230).

Text deploys a Hegelian interest in passages where pagan person (one of cult’s founders) meditates on the significance of the disaster:

The unthought thought [!] that the men in the car had blocked was this: Though each step, each appearance and disappearance, was singularly unique, the spirit lodged in them was of an unalterable whole, inseparable from past steps, a part of future ones—it was not the mere passage of finite existences, themselves with which one had to reckon, but with passage itself; motion, not the moving thing. And though opposites her feet—this, too, had been at the edge of her broken thoughts—though apparently isolate and contrary, at their source they were a single essence, there their duality disappeared. (125)

Is an 'unthought thought' bratticed or cruelly penetrated? Text is slick in this way to the extent it modulates its rhetoric on the basis of the perspective. Different character is concerned with “signs leading to the immediacy of catastrophe” (186), “the emergent numerical pattern” (id.). He complains about how others “monologized without cease” and the “gradually darkening world” (187). He is nonetheless a semiurgical nihilist insofar as

this disaster, this one in particular, provided him, provided him in particular, some vital urgent message: as though—as though he had been the intended victim and had in some incredible manner escaped, and now he had one more chance, one more chance to find the way out, to discover the system that would allow him to predict and escape the next blow. (188)

Events to the semiurgical nihilist must bear a particularized message from someone, but are unimportant for their mere existence. Cult’s main founder, to the semiurgical nihilist, is an unknown: “The very anonymity lent an unreal—or, rather, a superreal—odor to the occasion, a kind of terror, the terror inevitably associated with voids, infinities, absences, facelessness, zero” (189). The semiurgical nihilism is catching, too: “Everyone had his own opinion about the meaning of events” (208). Eventually one single tone of seriousness shall dominate: “Death as a sign can mean only one thing […] the end of the world!” (211). This is nihilistic because “the future looks to me just like a big goddamn empty hole” (214), “their empty futures hovering like birds of prey” (215). In the end, nihilist’s system fits together with fundy’s “in the mating posture, one embracing from above, the other reaching up from below” (259); though fundy “championed the intuitive life, her behavior was reassuringly rational” whereas nihilist’s “rationalism reached to the superreal, became a kind of rational advocacy of the irrational” (160), a nifty interpenetration of opposites. Is it also therefore a cruel interpenetration of the bratticing of the binary same/different? Are we into Foucault’s The Order of Things here?

A main protagonist is a journalist, who reflects on one of his liaisons as “too self-consciously seen himself as for the sweet moment suspended between two female hungers (Golgotha: that timeless ubiquitous image!)” (191), which is kinda a perfect juxtaposition. He is to be bratticed away from the unknowable malefactors. Journalist, as antagonist of cult, nevertheless assists in creating them via pure market mechanism: “the newspaper stories have carried their fame far and wide, and the way, she discovers, has been prepared” (354)—the “same truth by different paths” (id.).

Overall, lots of great intra-fundy/intra-cultic confrontations, as well as inter-ecclesia altercations, as well as discord with rationalism/atheism/materialism. Definitely an intellectual debate here. Plenty of Bataille’s accursed share. Much analysis of syncretic tradition. Something cooly gramscian in local cappies setting up a “Common Sense Committee” (250) in order to combat the cult. Plenty more. Go read.

Recommended for human bodies that are the instruments of lust, those whose vertiginous minds were convinced that disaster is a dream, and persons subject to blunt reminders, from the insensate earth, of the real.

[Kansas · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2024...

“Pringados. ¡Dios, aquel sitio estaba podrido hasta el tuétano! Reza, apoquina y pálmala en la mina. Jesús, ¿cuándo iban a aprender? No había más que fijarse en el desastre. Vale, su viejo salió, sí, pero, para empezar, ¿qué demonios estaba haciendo allá abajo?”


Para quien ya haya leído a Robert Coover esta novela le debe parecer rara, como a mí me lo ha parecido, en el sentido de que aquí no hay mucho de lo que luego se volvió casi una marca de la casa: posmodernismo exacerbado: no hay metáforas metaficcionales, y aunque si hay sátira, está sazonada de literalidad, de casi clasicismo. Fue su primera novela publicada en 1966 e imagino que si esta misma novela la hubiera escrito una vez elaborado este estilo tan personal suyo, se hubiera convertido en un festival rococó de personajes rozando lo caricaturesco y aunque aquí todavía no está ese Coover hiperexagerado sí que brilla continuamente por lo cómico, arriesgado y por lo absolutamente brillante a la hora de diseccionar los comportamientos humanos. Para lo que luego fue Coover, El orígen de los brunistas es una novela casi clásica o realista en la que ya se detectan los derroteros por los que luego se zambulliría sin pudor alguno, aunque aquí todavía Coover, conserva un cierto pudor.


“Preocupación: de hecho ¿qué noche en West Condon termina sin preocupaciones? La preocupación es el temor universal templado por la esperanza, prolepsis del placer y el dolor por igual, tan intrínseca de la condición humana, que la humanidad ha sido definida por ella alguna que otra vez. Y así, esta noche, a los padres les preocupan sus hijas, a las esposas sus maridos, a los ministros sus rebaños, a los médicos sus pacientes, a los brunistas cómo se enfrentarán al Fin, a los escépticos la verdad, al alcalde el bochorno y la vergüenza y las próximas elecciones, a los empresarios el desplome y a los mineros el desempleo, a los hijos sus envejecidos padres, y a todos los habitantes de West Condon les preocupa que una que otra vez, a menos que duerman como benditos delante de la tele, su salud o su virilidad o su peso o su período o su felicidad o cuándo o cómo van a morir.”


En El origen de los brunistas Robert Coover describe cómo surge un culto religioso en un pequeño pueblo perdido en ninguna parte de Estados Unidos. La violencia que atrae, la forma en la que impacta sobre sus ciudadanos será la idea central, y ya en 1966, esta novela de Coover parece una especie de visión del futuro con las sectas que surgirían mucho después en Estados Unidos, sectas famosas que hicieron conocidos en el mundo entero los pueblos en los que estallaron. Lo que más le atrae a Coover es ese impacto, ese malestar, esa olla a presión que irá a más atormentando a cada uno de sus ciudadanos. Todos se sentirán atrapados. Las aspiraciones, el ideal basado en un principio que conduce a la ruina, a la corrupción y al desastre, es uno de esos temas recurrentes en Coover que desarrollaría ya en sus próximas obras, como dije antes, ya sin pudor y siendo siempre de lo más politicamente incorrecto.


“El tiempo sigue su marcha, parece correr y arrastrarse al mismo tiempo. La gente tiene la cabeza puesta en la cena y el partido, y la charla, charla sobre cualquier cosa, charla y escucha charlar. Sobre religión, sexo, política, pasta de dientes, comida, estrellas de cine y boxeadores. Sobre pesca, horóscopos, ropa de mujer, automóviles, sobre la naturaleza humana."

De esto y aquello, putas, vírgenes, esposas, hijas, tiempo y dinero. De aburrimiento y buenas épocas. De ganar peso, de ir en serio, del cáncer, la evolución, los padres, los viejos tiempos, de Jesús, de fichajes, de beisbol. De sádicos, santos y locales de comida. Charla que te charla, sin parar.

De remedios, de dejar de fumar. Del trabajo, de mejores trabajos, de lo atolondrados que están los chavales, de televisión, de minería, de la lista de éxitos. De remedios contra la indigestión. De judíos, árabes, comunistas, negros, de la universidad. De remedios contra la impotencia. Del Espíritu Santo.

De los habitantes de West Condon; principalmente de eso: de los habitantes de West Condon, qué narices les pasa, qué tonterías han hecho de qué se habla, por qué hablan como hablan, quién está molesto, qué chistes han contado, por qué no son felices, qué va mal en sus hogares.”


El pueblo es West Condon, situado en el Medio Oeste de Estados Unidos, una mina estalla y se cobra 97 muertos. El único superviviente será Giovanni Bruno, gris, invisible e introvertido, católico no practicante, será la señal que verán algunos de sus conciudadanos para convertirlo en una especie de profeta de un nuevo culto, el de los brunistas. La gracia puede estar en las visiones de Bruno, visiones casi inventadas por este misterioso grupo fundador del culto de los brunistas, porque Giovanni Bruno no es que haya dado muestras de mucha lucidez más que la de haber conseguido sobrevivir al derrumbe de la mina. Serán los que le circundan, los que creen en él como excusa a un misticismo o espiritualidad a la que no sabían dar salida, los que conformarán el retrato que los demás tendrán de Bruno. Miller, el editor del periódico local, los desenmascara y a partir de aquí los brunistas se harán no solo más populares sino que ganarán adeptos: “Probó a poner sus principios en orden y descubrió que, en suma, no tenía ninguno. Se sentía sobrecargado de trabajo y falto de reconocimiento, cansado del juego que se traía entre manos, de las máscaras que se ponía”. Estos brunistas además anticipan el fin del mundo, con lo que crearán alarma, chistes, carcajeo, violencia e inestabilidad en el entorno. Coover está continuamente destapando el histerismo, la locura que lleva al fanatismo religioso, y cómo esto incide no tanto en la secta, sino sobre todo en los ciudadanos de la localidad, aquellos que están fuera sin participar y que sin embargo, sufrirán las consecuencias en su día a día.


"Él y Sal se pusieron a rumiar sobre los viejos tiempos, sobre lo que era ser un chaval inmigrante en un lugar con tan poco gas y sin ninguna historia, sobre las peleas casi diarias con polacos, paletos y croatas donde nadie entendía a nadie, sobre que los viejos siempre estaban ahorrando para pirarse de vuelta a su lugar de origen.....“


Lo que más me llama la atención en esta novela de cocción lenta es el microcosmos de personajes que consigue crear aquí Robert Coover. A priori parece una novela en la que uno o dos personajes predominantes son los que conducirán la historia pero no, es una novela totalmente coral, en la que las historias personales se irán desplegando y desarrollándose a medida que la novela avanza. Genial será la primera parte en la que Coover nos describe el derrumbe de la mina en la que nos hace un esbozo de muchos de estos mineros, el ritmo, el desastre en el que se ven envueltos, una narrativa totalmente visceral y llena de vida, de sonidos, conversaciones, angustias, desesperación.. Lo que en un principio parecían personajes tópicos de ese Medio Oeste, los mineros, sus hijos, las esposas, dejan de ser tópicos para convertirse en auténticos retratos psicológicos con una hondura tal que los convierte en cada uno de ellos, en esenciales. Es una coralidad además conformada por la diversidad que supone que la mayoría sean hijos de la segunda generación de inmigrantes, en este aspecto resulta un relato fantástico de este microsmos local.


“La semana anterior Vince había experimentado una curiosa sensación de euforia nerviosa, pero el efecto empezaba a desvanecerse. Lo que la causó fue decir en voz alta lo que llevaba treinta años queriendo decir: que a tomar viento la mina. Entregó un par de solicitudes po rel pueblo, habló con varias personas, se jactó de estar al comienzo de una nueva vida, ya tuviera cincuenta años o no. Además, había que tener mucho valor para aprender cosas nuevas cuando se estaba al borde del segundo medio siglo; todos valoraban eso. De hecho, en ocasiones habían insistido demasiado en el detalle. Vince se había puesto un poco de los nervios. Concretamente, ¿qué narices podía aprender él?, se preguntaba; tras lo cual, con la misma rapidez, aparcaba la cuestión; antes, a ver qué le pedían que aprendiera.”


A partir del derrumbe de la mina todo el pueblo se tambalea y como una figura de dominó, el pueblo se enfrenta a la hecatombe, a la casi ruina, el desempleo campará a sus anchas, lo que influirá al resto del pueblo porque la economía que hacía subsistir West Condon a través de esta mina, hará tambalearse el status quo. Es esta atmósfera de desesperación e inseguridad palpable lo que hará que la gente busque profetas y salvación a este vacío en el que se van adentrando. Entiendo que el verdadero tema aquí no es tanto el de la nueva religión, la de los brunistas, sino la de la idiosincrasia de un pueblo pequeño en medio de ninguna parte, la corrupción, el poder, la política y de cómo aprovechan un daño colateral para imponerse sobre la gente que está más perdida y desesperada que nunca. Coover ha creado en West Condon un pueblo totalmente real, que transpira vida, y aunque en un principio parece una novela caótica porque da la impresión de no tener un argumento concreto, sí que es cierto, que llegado un punto el lector se hará consciente de que lo que importa es la visión global que tengamos de esta comunidad: un hecho, el estallido de la mina y de cómo esto se irá enlazando con el desgaste y la descomposición de una comunidad que hasta ahora había marchado hacia adelante. En cada uno de estos personajes, se expresará este microcosmos local y Coover lo transmitirá con humor en muchos momentos, pero también con la desesperación de la naturaleza humana cuando ve que el mundo que conocía se derrumba sintiéndose atrapado, sin salida. Y aunque sea una novela publicada en 1966, West Condon, ahora más que nunca, se convierte en el reflejo del mundo en el que vivimos.


“En cierto modo, no sé, pero en cierto modo, al crecer en tierra extraña y demás, siempre como que consideré este sitio de un modo raro, como si me retuvieran aquí contra mi voluntad y el pueblo solo fuera un puñado de puñeteros extranjeros a los que no comprendí y jamás podría comprender. Pero he llegado a ver las cosas mejor, Sal. He captado la forma de ser de este pueblo. A veces, maldita sea mi estampa, tengo la sensación de haber estado toda la vida peleando con quién no debía.”

♫♫♫ Life and Death - Balanescu Quartet ♫♫♫

[Nancy Oakes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. I'm going to read the sequel, The Brunists' Day of Wrath, when it comes out in 2014 from Dzanc books -- I don't want to wait until March, so close on the heels of finishing the original novel, but well, I suppose I don't have much of a choice in the matter. As the book blurb on the back cover notes, The Origin of the Brunists won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for Best First Novel, but imho, it certainly doesn't read like a first novel.

At its heart, the book is an account of the rise of a religious cult and the resulting religious fervor coming on the heels of a terrible mine disaster, but really, that statement is way too simplistic. It begins with a prologue as the people in the cult, known as the Brunists, have gathered the day before the second coming on a hill they've named the Mount of Redemption. A terrible event occurs, one that goes on to find its way into the very legends, myths and art of the religion. This part is related by a new convert, who seems slightly confused. The rest of the novel reveals what happened leading up to that event and beyond, beginning with the disaster at the mine, an event which will ultimately leave an entire town and several lives in chaos.

I'm skipping most of the plot elements here, but you can read them in my blog discussion here.

With lots of humor interspersed throughout the book, this is one of the craziest novels I've ever read. Aside from the new religion, which imho isn't the real focus of this book but rather the centerpiece around which the characters react, the author really gets into small-town life and minds, the workings of power and politics, and how seemingly "normal" people can get caught up in their own various forms of madness and mania. I'd say it's a novel about the people of West Condon much more than anything else. The author is a genius when it comes to the characters -- and it's really incredibly tough to believe that this was Mr. Coover's first novel. It does take some time and attention to get through, not because it's difficult to read, but because the author so carefully and slowly develops the frenzy that occurs not just among the Brunists, but the craziness occurring throughout the entire town. It also shows that no matter what sort of community these people find themselves in, even in "A community of good will," everything eventually comes down to matters of self interest -- a very non-idealistic view that makes this book well worth reading. Definitely recommended.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

"O the sons of light are marching since the coming of the dawn.
Led by Giovanni Bruno and the voice of Domiron!
We shall look upon God's Glory after the world is gone!
For the end of time has come!"

This was a very fun read. It was really odd reading the novel after finding out that April 18 and 19 of 2015 would fall on a Saturday and Sunday. This compelled me to read the novel just in case the world came to an end on the Mount of Redemption.

Origins started off slow, introducing folks and all, but picked up steam with all of the religious fervor after the mine collapse. I didn't find the amount of characters overwhelming once I was able to keep them straight from one another; so many proclaimed religious leaders. There was quite a bit of humor throughout, how could there not be with religious nuts running around. I am curious how Wrath will be since it is set several years later.

[Andrew]

Coover hits you over the head with religious motif and symbol. Giovanni Bruno = John Brown (perhaps with a Giordano Bruno reference thrown in for good measure?), Angelo Moroni = The Angel Moroni, which should mean something to you if you've studied Mormonism, the depth of a mine turning into the heights of heaven, and so forth. But what's more interesting to me is the way that this reflects the stark realities of the Rust Belt and deindustrialization. What Coover fully demonstrates is that fanaticism and grotesquerie are only natural side effects when a community is getting anally raped by the machinery of capitalism.

[Jack Waters · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the novel, a small town, West Condon, is tossed into a frenzy when Deepwater Number Nine Coalmine collapses. Scores of lives are lost. Families torn apart. Religious congregations are forced to reorder hierarchy. Newspapers, unions, mystics, out-of-towners: they all want to be able to define the disaster on their own terms. Meanwhile, the city of West Condon suffers and tries to cope.

Filling the void of disaster is a rare moment in which a community can forge a new identity. It’s made far easier when a story or myth can back up the new identity. In many cases a disaster is simply book-ended with another disaster, or -- as it is called more often -- an apocalypse. End of the World dynamics have been at play pretty much since humans felt that Another Side was speaking to Them.

When an Event lacks answers, it is more difficult to question the interpretations growing out from it. Swindlers of all kinds have a heyday: money is to be had, minds are to be manipulated, heroism is to be retroactive, martyrs abound. West Condon was ripe for a paradigm shift with the coal mine collapse. Many succumbed. A new religion was formed, a prophet provided a mantle. All of these things were made possible by the first tragedy in the coal mine.

Angelo Moroni, a character from the novel that was working in the mine, is a name embedded deeply into Mormon mythology. Indeed, it was Angel Moroni(muh-ROW-nye), who was said to have appeared in visions to the imaginative, young Joseph Smith in the early 1800s to lead him toward his Gold Plates from which he said he transcribed the Book of Mormon, the Latter-day Saint scripture which serves as the keystone to the most American of all religions.[***footnote]

Everyone in the town is eager to see what will happen; all eyes and minds are transfixed on either the What Has or What Will on the happenings. In “Origin of the Brunists,” we see this even in the traffic -- when the coal mine collapses, the streets are jam packed, keeping even rescuers and responders from arriving in proper time. Fast forward to another, later Event on the mountain -- where the purported End of the World is said to be ushered in -- and the streets are similarly packed, perhaps with the same curious people fueled with similar denial and intrigue. I don’t want to reveal too much, but the parallels of the Events are striking, booming, Other-Worldly.

With this being his first novel, it’s no wonder that Robert Coover has maintained an acclaimed writing career. I am very antsy to get my hands on the sequel to this novel, which is in the final stages of publication. It has been a long road -- The Origin of the Brunists was published nearly 50 years ago in 1966. The story stands well alone, but could have wonderful results when we find out what else has gone on in West Condon since we last heard dispatches from the malleable folks.

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[***footnote] Angelo isn’t in very many scenes -- he succumbs to the early mine disaster, he was a boss -- but it is alluded that he tried with Pilate-like lukewarmness to prevent such disasters by demanding that his workers not smoke in the mines, for fear of sparking the gas from the mine’s crevasses. There’s perhaps more to this train of thought, and that is why I make note of it here. Anyone who has seen the top of a Mormon temple has seen a figure in gold blowing a trumpet facing east, essentially a heavenly version of the Jerry West NBA logo. This figure is Angel Moroni. He sounds his cry of warning to all that will listen, and alas, most either refuse to listen. I am trying to find allusions to this in scholarly work -- writer Brian Evenson has written on Coover’s works and might be the best source since he grew up Mormon(as did I). I contacted him to ask his thoughts if he’ll oblige. I think there is a lot going on in this novel that might be passed over with a pedestrian read, because the narrative is so straightforward. You don’t need to know that Angelo Moroni has Mormon significance to gain much from the story, but I imagine a writer like Coover doesn’t just pepper his works with happenstance for the hell of it. As soon as I hear a response from Brian Evenson -- if he does respond -- then I will update the review.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vince had always imagined God as a tough dark old bastard who lived a good ways off, but had a long rubbery arm, spoke street Italian, gave the sonsa-bitches their due, and for some inexplicable reason had a particular fondness for Vince. His vision hadn’t changed much, except he was beginning to suspect God maybe had come to lump him in with the sonsabitches.

The Origin of Brunists begins with a coal mine collapse in West Condon (as best I can tell, a town that is entirely the invention of Coover, of undefined geographic location) that traps 98 workers. All but one of the trapped miners – Giovanni Bruno – are killed; with Bruno being rescued from the mine in a coma due to carbon monoxide poisoning. He eventually awakens from the coma, and a small doomsday cult springs up around him.

Let’s just get this out of the way up front: this book is outstanding. Prior to this I had only read Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants, which I thought had some standout stories (review here), but was ultimately not bowled over by. Consider me a Coover convert now, as this book – his goddamned first novel – shines in basically every way. It is literate, well composed, and even in very small doses begins to show some willingness to embrace experimental narrative forms – which Coover clearly dives head first into in later works - where effective (the chapter of the mine collapse, a later chapter structured to parallel the Christ betrayal narrative, interspersed thoughts and asides and atypical paragraph structures) – and even outside of the more atypically structured passages, the book excels by just being exceptionally well written. Coover displays a knack for creating and supporting a fully formed town throughout the novel; his style of writing constantly inundates the reader with details – past actions, present events, tangential asides, interior thoughts; all tangled together in long paragraph blocks – in a manner that is both entertaining and illuminating. As the novel progresses the town and its people become more and more familiar to the reader through this constant fleshing out of the West Condon envrions – but it’s organic as opposed to pedantic, and the characters are superbly crafted as products of their environment where the reader is not only becoming familiar with West Condon through the constant stream of narrative minutiae and ephemera, they also are learning the town by the type of people it produces and fosters.

On top of all that the book is simultaneously funny and tragic. There are passages that our frequently laugh out loud funny –in description, scenario, dialogue – but the backdrop of the town on the brink of economic collapse due to the temporary closure of the mine, piled on top of the already poor conditions present in a typical mid-west mining town, give a setting of desperation that Coover does not shy away from, and his portrayal of the hardships present in the town is honest and feels accurate. Through it all he displays a steadfast wit buoyed by an apparent compassion and tenderness for the characters in his novel, all in their own way seeking some rare grace and redemption, which gives the book a gentleness that – at times at least – offsets its brutality and desperation. In all, an exceptional novel that is highly recommended.

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Coover today "teaches electronic and experimental writing at Brown University". My general impression of Brown University's English Department comes from an alumnus friend of mine, who majored in English, but holds a grudge the size of Coover's forthcoming 'Wrath of the Brunists' against his school. He sums it up with a story about the end of one particularly painful, particularly Brownist English course: the professor (not sure who) asked if anyone had any questions; a well-respected woman stood and asked, quote "Why do you hate literature?"

So I was a little wary of this one, though the rapturous blurbs and plot summary should have tipped me off that this is not electronic or experimental. The prologue is a sludgy pastiche of American biblical prose, the first chapter told from an awfully dull omniscient narrator, but from then on it's very, very well done realism, with long sections told from very stable, characteristic, individual points of view.

Coover tries to give everyone equal treatment, but there is a central character, who is more or less a good late liberal dick swinging '60s kind of guy--despises religion, despises ignorance, but calls his predestined lover 'Happy Bottom', and never by her actual name (Happy Bottom, by the way, is a fantastic character, and I hope 'Wrath' is mainly her making fun of everyone). I was glad he got the shit kicked out of him. Anyway, these two find their salvation, "not the void within and ahead, but the immediate living space between two."

There are plenty of historical nudges, as character fulfill the functions of, e.g., John the Baptist, or Paul, or Christ, or Judas. But there's no sustained allegory (probably for the better). There's much well deserved criticism of pretty much everything you might describe as 'The American National Character' (revivalist religion; ultra-rationalism; anti-rationalism; nationalism; commercialization of life; liberal self-righteousness), and not a whole lot of positive ideals set up in their place.

It's too long, but otherwise this is just a really well done satire of ideas, that doesn't really provoke much thought after you put it down. Here's hoping the sequel is a bit like this, and not like Coover's later, 'subversive' re-writings of porn films.

[Brent Hayward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Coover is a vanguard figure in the realm of postmodern literature: an old man now (obviously), clever, white, with streaks of misogyny I try to let pass as product of his time. (People actually pinched bottoms and thought it was ok?) I've read a few books from his latter years, abandoned one or two, never quite warming up to RC's oeuvre but understanding and respecting his place in the whole scheme of letters and weird book writing. Origin of the Brunists is Coover's first novel, however, and was surprisingly straightforward with very few flourishes of what was to come. The subject is a bit of an easy target: basically, religion / ignorance, and the ever present mingling of the two, but on the whole a satisfying read. Titular Giovanni Bruno is an unliked introvert possible autistic in a mining town filled with small-minded zealots and meddling rednecks. Through an act of cowardice, he becomes the sole survivor in a mining disaster (based on true events-- the explosion and cave-in is a powerful start to the book) who then becomes a figure of worship for a growing cult. Crescendoes of mayhem ensue. Lots of great characters, many nice scenes, love grows and dies, and the worst of humanity's awfulness gets exposed in the spotlight.

[Edmundo Mantilla · Rating 5 out of 5]

¿Qué es esto y por qué no leí antes? Son las preguntas que uno se realiza cuando se encuentra a mitad de la novela de Coover. Poco puedo decir de la trama y de los personajes, no porque carezcan de interés, sino más bien porque las interrogantes sobre ellos se despositan una sobre otra, inagotables. Una mina estalla. Hay muerte, confusión, desolación, tristeza y miedo. Todos buscan la redención. Los únicos que la obtenemos somos los bienaventurados lectores de Coover.

[Javier Avilés · Rating 3 out of 5]

De como una explosión en una mina suscita el nacimiento de una secta religiosa y como eso destruye la convivencia en un pueblo estadounidense. Sensacional primera novela de Coover, tanto en contenido como en estructura.

[Rob · Rating 2 out of 5]

I usually don't go near first novels. I leave them alone. They suffer from being over written and often have an over wrought quality that I really detest. "The Origin of the Brunists" has had many favourable reviews. It was published in 1966 and has had many reprints. The author has a good reputation and has had many other novels and works of non fiction published. The subject matter of the novel, a millennial cult, is the sort of thing that I have always found intriguing: just how did Jim Jones get his followers to drink the Kool Aid?

This book unfortunately did have that first novel syndrome where there is just too much writing. A good piece of writing is a lot like good Jazz; it is not about the notes, it is about the space between the notes. This is like a Phil Spector produced song. It is a wall of words and plot blaring full bore at the reader. There are often excellent pieces of descriptive writing with an immediacy and urgency that rival Dickens but unlike Dickens the structure and plot are a woeful mess. There is a lot of chopping and changing of narrative between the characters which is fair enough but there is often no signaling to the reader that this is about to happen. This coupled with over complex sentences leads to confusion. There is so much confusion that I found 3 or 4 bad typos that have gone unnoticed since 1966 because the editors were obviously too confused!

The insights Robert Coover has about the roots of religious mania are perhaps more relevant today than they were in 1966. Millennial cults are born of despair and poverty but this is not an unusual situation in human affairs. There has to be the right people in the right time and place that can hybridize a new belief system that has enough resonance with current religion but different enough to make a new believer a convert and not simply a heretic. Coover also has a cataclysmic event , a mine disaster, that starts of building an hysterical pitch in a down at heal community already awash with religious credulity. He creates a perfect storm for this sort of phenomena.

To an observer 6000 miles away these sort of conditions are more present in todays America than 1960's America. There is an economic, social and political crisis that seemingly has no end. There is a fin de siecle 'feel' however of an end but yet no new start. These conditions are ripe for millenarian movements be they political, social or religious.

[Bill Shackleford · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Origins of the Brunists” is a novel written in the late 1960s that I purchased at Powell’s Book Store while visiting Portland. When I returned to the Midwest, I found myself engaged for a week in slowly reading this powerfully written book with its fascinating characters, horrible incidents and great helpings of ironic humor. Ostensibly the subject is an exploration of an Apocalyptic cult that develops after a mining disaster that kills many miners but inexplicably spares a cryptic individual whose few utterances lead others to believe that he is attuned to some ultimate spiritual purpose.

One of the things I found fascinating is the sympathy Coover shows when describing the cultists (labeled Brunists by the atheistic newspaper editor) and their various ways of trying to understand mystically the purpose of terrible events and the meaning of an otherwise empty existence. Of course these imperfect individuals are treated ironically, but so are the other residents of the town of West Condon who either deny questions about existential meaning or who react with anger, violence and stupid behavior to some threat they cannot comprehend. Most giggle-worthy are the repeated vapid admonitions of the town’s Common Sense Committee who fear the Brunists are harming the town's reputation.

If I had to pick a favorite character, it would have to be nurse in love with the newspaper editor. He calls her Happy Bottom. Her written missives to him under the name of the Black Hand are fabulous. She is his savior and his source of comfort from the ills of the world.

With reluctance I am putting off securing Robert Coover’s follow-up, “The Wrath of the Brunists”, since it is 1100 pages long.

[Peter Kerry Powers · Rating 4 out of 5]

A superior book. One of the best reads I've had in several months. The kind of book that from the first page makes you feel you are in the presence of something not just good, but potentially great. Felt this way all the way until the very end, but I thought the denouement was somehow cheap and unearned, or maybe just predictable. The wild orgy of violence and self-mutilation at the end satisfies a certain sneery take on religious belief, whereas the book otherwise held the question of faith in an indeterminate suspension throughout--yes, the Brunists are just a little bit looney, but then again, who isn't. That falls apart in the descent in to madness, and the romantic ending between Miller and the sexpot, sweet, but brainless nurse is thesis-ridden in a way I found unfortunate. Too bad, but the rest of the book is so good that I am still willing to say it's a book that everyone should read.

[Paolo Latini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Il primo primissimo Coover è un pre-Coover: preannuncia il suo post-moderno—che inizierà con The Universal Baseball Association due anni dopo e continuerà con i racconti di Pricksong and Descants—e si muove in un territorio ibrido, dove a realismo e naturalismo si mescolano elementi surreali e assurdi. C'è un primo attacco alle istituzioni (cosa che poi Coover farà un po' in tutta la sua opera), qui politiche oltre che ovviamente religiose, e una prima distesa e minuziosa analisi della società come un disequilibrio costante tra forze miopi e caotiche: “Any society is a kind of jerryrig at best, and it’s hard to think of one without the compromises that make it seem absurd.”

[Geoffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

What happens when faith and alleged rationality clash? Wacky, and sometimes lethal, hijinx, is what! Some of this feels a little, oh, I don't know, poorly-defined? But it's still very good.

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 4 out of 5]

A long-time fan of The Universal Baseball Association: Henry J. Waugh, Proprietor (which I first read in 1969 and twice since), I have only just now read my second Coover novel—his first—The Origin of the Brunists. Big mistake to have put it off so long!

Coover’s novel is a brilliant, bravura tour de force, a portrait of the people, the community, and the zeitgeist whose confluence generates a Christian splinter group, one based on a millennialist vision of final days. If such a description sounds tedious—and I agree that most discussion/satire of/about religion is overwrought, crude, and casually cruel—be assured that Origin of the Brunists is not just another trip to the carny to shoot some fish in a barrel.

Coover’s writing is sharp, focused, and continually propulsive, portraying the people of West Condon with almost clinical, non-judgmental objectivity—which ironically arises from a continual shifting of scene and point of view. Comedy, tragedy, and the whole panoramic spectacle are rendered in realistic and sometimes surreal/fantastic ways, making this story of willful delusions converging at a time and place sympathetic and even affecting.

Granted, Coover’s primary goal is entertainment, and a mordant humor is the novel’s most prevalent tone, but it’s an effect well earned. Coover lavishes attention and detail on his characters and settings, in the process generating a recognizable humanity in his portrayal of characters whose dreams become marred by earnest delusions.

A summary of events illustrates how twisted and convoluted the influences are that birth the Brunist movement. A mine collapse appears to kills 98, but there is a lone survivor, a lapsed Catholic whose limited recovery of mental faculties is taken for a new profundity/spirituality, and he becomes a laconic prophet. A beloved preacher dies in the mining accident, and he leaves his wife an incomplete, as-I-am-dying message, and she becomes an evangelist of final days. A teacher who is primarily a spiritualist seeking confirmation and acolytes interprets the mining collapse in her own lights, yet joins forces with the widow and the prophet Bruno. A small clique forms around these three, and a stern, red-haired Presbyterian preacher who succeeds the beloved preacher becomes the Brunists’ chief antagonist. That red-haired preacher’s sociopathic son finds a burnt hand at the site of the mine accident, and he uses the hand to secretly perpetrate mischief throughout West Condon, further antagonizing Brunist, Presbyterian, and Catholic factions and making the rest of the community anxious and fractious. A newspaper editor early on joins the Brunists because he sees a story and because he is smitten with the prophet’s sister, ethereal and pretty. The Brunists’ first attempt to predict and worship the Lord’s coming goes bust, but the editor’s revelations in the local paper, then national papers, make him a Judas and generate even more interest in the Brunists’ next end-of-days convocation.

The guiding sensibility in the novel belongs to Justin “Tiger” Miller, the editor of the Chronicle who’s infiltrated the burgeoning Brunist movement for opportunistic and amatory reasons. Miller’s hard-nosed self-interest is more than matched by the cynical Lou Jones, Miller’s second-in-command at the Chronicle. When Jones photographs and makes a public joke of Miller’s love interest within the Brunists, they clash and Jones’ firing from the Chronicle and exit from West Condon sets up their reunion in the novel’s climax—the apocalyptic, carnivalesque pageantry of faith, venality, and violence on the Mount of Redemption (better known to the miners in the town as Cunt Hill). This climax has a Day of the Locust feel to it, but unlike the protagonist in that novel, Miller survives the trampling and injuries, waking to find his arms in casts, stretched to immobility by traction cables.

(This climactic collision of forces is well done, and it provides some of the drollest moments in the novel: two cops have rented the land for the day and are charging for admission to the end-of-the-world spectacle; and while events are coming to a head, there is a peculiar countdown of random numbers being announced, and these turn out to be for a bingo game that is transpiring alongside the fast-erupting violence of thunder storm, Brunists, and taunting townspeople.)

In the novel’s epilogue, the erstwhile-miner-cum-prophet Bruno is taken off to a sanatorium, the Brunists establish a church and ministry throughout the United States, and Miller is nursed back to health by a saner and less ethereal love interest. The novel has done all that its title promises, presenting in full and kaleidoscopic detail all the random characters, events, and ideas/delusions that when once they coalesce seem somehow to have been fated. And more, the novel does not simply rely on the satiric impulse to lampoon Christian fanaticism: Coover gives us a wide-ranging inventory of individuals, events, and community in his depiction of spiritual and religious impulses, influences, sublimations, and delusions.

[Agatha Glowacki · Rating 3 out of 5]

**SPOILERS**

The Origin of the Brunists is based on real mine explosion in Illinois known by author Robert Coover, which he uses as the basis for a full-fledged account of the origin and growth of a fundamentalist cult in small town Midwestern America. In this first novel of his, Coover takes readers on a dense and dark journey, using slow, subtle building of the narrative terror and hysteria to show the devastating and destructive impact that uncertainty can have on people. It revolves around the mine explosion that kills 97 people, disrupting the economic, social, and religious life of the community. One man - Giovanni Bruno - survives, and the plot slowly but intensely grows to reveal how he is exploited into the basis of a religion. The obvious message is about how a normal group of individuals can turn into a frenzied, hysterical, cultish mob, but beneath that - the story is about how uncertainty that is not dealt with can corrode a society to the point of violence, disorder, and hysteria.

A couple of themes struck me and reminded me of lessons from past history or academic studies, and others reminded me of two recent, excellent television shows depicting much of the same idea. Firstly, I appreciated how the power of language / words was shown, for example when the note from the popular lay preacher Ely Collins, who died in the accident, was found and “interpreted” in an extreme way. He simply wrote a generic line, “I dissobayed and I know I must Die. Listen allways to the Holy Spirit in your Harts Abide in Grace . We will stand Together befor Our Lord the 8th of “ that then takes on a life of it’s own. It’s life is given to it by the self-interest of many key characters, each who have something to gain for themselves although are often unaware of these underlying motives and drives. This simple process is often reflected in real life, in which many religious interpretations of sacred texts are used to justify personal drives and desires.

This imaginative interpretation escalates once Bruno awakes, although he has been heavily damaged by carbon monoxide. When he finally utters words, they are fantastical - about a white bird, the coming of light, and gathering on the Mount of Redemption. Yet these words are taken as “prophecies”. The scary part is that the woman - widow of a minister-miner - behind this evolution of words into prophecy is sincerely devout, causing us to realize how dangerous the phenomenon of belief and devotion can be. It is fascinating to see the progression throughout the story as signs are deciphered, then, re-deciphered continuously.

With this building, we have the owner of the town newspaper, an atheist, decide to have some fun with this development - becoming a sort of hero of the story as the town devolves into madness. Yet his actions are not thought out and act as a tinder thrown into the situation. The character of Miller, as a sceptic observing events, reminded me of the excellent HULU show The Path, also about the growth of an apocalyptic cult. One character in that show plays a similar role to Miller, but as an FBI agent undercover. Just like Miller, he takes extensive notes about the cult, but finds it hard to find any story worth publishing (or prosecuting for).

I found the story dense and packed with multiple intersecting subplots, making is hard to follow at times. There is a seriousness to the story that builds the plot’s intensity. I found myself repelled by the town and it’s people, especially the small-town feel of gossip, and yet was taken on this protracted ride unable to get off until the end. I also was often confused by the prose and needed to read and re-read often.

The end reminds me of the clash during another excellent TV show, the Leftovers. In that show, the cult (also wearing all white, what is that deal?) orchestrates a “final” confrontation with the locals that leads to intense violence. In both stories, the situation escalates as national reporters descend and the cult attracts new members, from nearby towns, nationally, and internationally. In both, some locals earnestly attempt to deprogram the believers, which mostly just worsens tensions. This highlights the sad truth that arguing with logic is often more counterproductive in cases such as these.In such instances, there are always skeptics who balk, hoot, and forewarn but often exert no power to stop the unfolding situation. This clash between the cultist believers and the local non-believers (many of whom were power laden in the prior situation) reminded me of the plot in Game of Thrones when the religious cult takes on the ruling family.

The natural end of any such cult is death and destruction. It inevitably eats itself, like the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros. The hero of the story, Miller, is attacked. The power and madness of the mob is portrayed when the Brunists blame Miller for the death of Marcella, and viciously beat him, although he ends up surviving. And yet we are left with this haunting reality that even after so much pain and misery caused by the cult, he might not be able to leave after all - his nurse and savior Happy Bottom (a wonderful touch) entices him to stay to cover the story about the Brunists returning for their first anniversary. And so we readers are left with dread that nothing good waits for the town or for Miller in the future.

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Origin of the Brunists is a novel after my own heart. Coover does some wonderful stuff here in order to conjure the entire town of West Condon as its main character: the frequent cross-cutting between different events and houses and people, all of whom are given a richness of texture without ever really being given control of the narrative spotlight for long. The way in which Coover creates an event (i.e. the mine collapse, but also others further along in the novel) is a masterclass of controlled freneticism.

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

A detailed literary anatomy of the birth of a cult. Intellectually engaging and worthwhile (oh,yes); written in a dense and opaque prose that unveils, digs and prods very thoroughly. And slowly. Some striking passages and sly insight, but sometimes felt like trudging through deep snow. In the fog.