The Brunist Day of Wrath

by Robert Coover

West Condon, small-town USA, five years later: the Brunists are back, loonies and "cretins" aplenty in tow, wanting it all—sainthood and salvation, vanity and vacuity, God’s fury and a good laugh—for the end is at hand.

The Brunist Day of Wrath, the long-awaited sequel to the award-winning The Origin of the Brunists, is both a scathing indictment of fundamentalism and a careful examination of a world where religion competes with money, common sense, despair, and reason.

Robert Coover has published fourteen novels, three books of short fiction, and a collection of plays since The Origin of the Brunists received the William Faulkner Foundation First Novel Award in 1966. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Playboy, amongst many other publications. A long-time professor at Brown University, he makes his home Providence, Rhode Island.

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

1005 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

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]

The Brunist Day of Wrath, as its title unequivocally suggests, is strictly apocalyptic… But as the novel is meticulously postmodernistic all the characters in it belong to “the culture of willful ignorance” picturesquely portrayed in the book – society of clowns: religious clowns, political buffoons, drunken jesters, amorous pranksters, criminal jokers, bloodthirsty comics – and all those clowns are sinister, self-serving and clueless.
Robert Coover’s mastery of language, his ability of profound social analysis and his discernment of the human nature turn the book into a sheer masterpiece.
Religion rules human minds ever since the antediluvian times and religion in general sounds like this:

The plain truth is life is mostly crap, is very short, and ends badly. Not many people can live with that, so they buy into a happier setup somewhere else, another world where life’s what you want it to be and nothing hurts and you don’t die. That’s religion. Has been since it got invented. Totally insane, but totally human.

And this is Christianity in particular:

Eat your god, suck his blood, and live forever.

But deep down, at the base of any religion there are libido and liberation of sexual energy:

Gods fucking mortals, whether as birds, bulls, dragons, or rain, are always stories of rape. Mary got bonked in the ear, so it was a kind of mind-rape. The Annunciation as an act of conceptual violence.

Consequently, any religion is nothing but a fantasy but this fantasy tends to turn into a domineering dogma controlling consciousness.

Blessed are the fantasists for they shall not be dismayed by oblivion! But damned are they who project their mad fantasies upon others!

And the clash of dissimilar fantasies surely ends up in Armageddon.
If you’re stupid or insane Jesus loves you all the same…

[Glenn Russell]

They're back!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


American author Robert Coover, born 1932

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Keeping Faith

The Brunist Day of Wrath is much larger than its predecessor, The Origin of the Brunists; it is also more theological, more ethnically tense, and (if this is possible) more desperate and more pessimistic. Perhaps all this reflects the progression of the USA from the publication of Origin in 1967 to that of Day of Wrath in 2014. Almost three generations is enough to change any country fundamentally. Or, given that it has been a somewhat stressful period for Uncle Sam, a long enough period to anneal the country into its terminal form.

The locus of the Day of Wrath, West Condon, has not fared well since the Brunists left at the end of Origin five years previously. The deep mines have closed. The strip mines that replaced them use machines not men to make their money. The flat mid-western countryside looks like it’s been tilled by a race of giant, incompetent farmers. The various remaining Christian churches are mouldering tribal enclaves whose members have lost hope if not faith. The Presbyterian minister has lost both, as well as his marbles.

And to top it off, the Brunists have sneaked back in. The folk of the town don’t like this, but other than bad memories and worse consciences about their expulsion, they really don’t know why. For the Brunists, West Condon is Jerusalem, the place of their originary revelation. For the residents, however, the divine is what they have in hand: “faith was always more an occupational convenience than mission.” And they intend to keep their faith. Yet another desolate place made even more desolate, therefore, by the mysteries of the human mind and spirit.

There is a recent theory that the first European immigrants to America passed on a sort of gullibility gene to their descendants that makes them acutely susceptible to things like advertising, propaganda, and religious cults. It was this trait, the theory goes, which induced them to leave the devils they were told about by promoters, ideologues, and co-religionists for the promise of a devil-free world in North America. In which case the American Dream is a neurosis which becomes a nightmare when slogans, party lines, and doctrines clash, as they inexorably must do. Perhaps West Condon is a sort of case study of the phenomenon. Certainly this is not too extreme an interpretation of Coover.

And therein, I think, lies the central paradox of American life captured by Coover. Herman Melville (The Confidence Man), Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Celestial Railroad) and Mark Twain (The War Prayer) all point to the well-established trait of gullibility but not to its source. H.G. Wells (War of the Worlds) and Lyndon Johnson (The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution) exploited the trait but didn't care to explain it. This is where Coover comes into his own, even before the emergence of Trump as the preeminent symbol of the national condition created by both nature and nurture.

Lacking common culture, the binding national force in America is economics. What is shared is neither history nor national ambition but a vague potential and desire for getting ahead. Efficiency - of production, of consumption, of life itself - is consequently the default criterion of success according to accepted economic theory. And efficiency can only be established through competition - among companies, between individuals, and in the great marketplace of ideas - including most significantly religious ideas. Efficiency implies that the less efficient - companies, people and ideas - cannot, should not, prosper. Their fate is to serve those who do; or die out. Competitive faith is as hard a regime in the 21st century as it was in the 16th or in the 1st, when it was first mooted.

In this sense at least, America is a truly Christian country, a country of faith. Intensity of belief is what matters - ultimately in oneself if one is sufficiently jaded by doctrinal religion (or in oneself as God in the doctrines of the Prosperity Gospel and Mormonism). This culture has no interest in genetics or background (except, of course, if one is of African origin, but there are none of these in West Condon). Faith, loyalty, boosterism, team playing, enthusiastic fealty to one’s beliefs and the group which supports, and likely provided, them is what really matters. The tradition of this culture of efficiency is not so much the substance of the beliefs but in the insistence with which one adheres to them. How many Christians after all concern themselves one way or the other with the issue of the Virgin Birth for example. One sides with the tribe in such matters. Individual thought is not encouraged in the land of individualism, strangely the most conformist place on the planet.

Forbes magazine, hardly a leftist mouthpiece, called gullibility “the American tax on optimism” (https://www.forbes.com/sites/richkarl...). But it is gullible insistence which breeds its own optimism, a kind of fellow well met cheeriness which is not infrequently about the end of the world as we know it, a joyful apocalypticism. Gullibility is a necessary correlate of the culture of efficiency. Without it America would never have existed, and could not continue to exist.

This is why nothing sells quite so well in America as righteous, political, divinely sanctioned, end-times anger (wrath, in other words) directed against a demonised ideological foe - socialists, immigrants, government, Jews, people of colour, elite city folk, the Other in general. Their alternative faith, or their lack of faith entirely, imply a challenge to one’s own beliefs that must be responded to with vigour and, if necessary, violence. This is the law of the frontier, or at least the myths handed down about the frontier (keeping in mind the gullibility gene).

America is indeed “the world behaving as a theater for [one’s] inmost thoughts” As Trump so diligently demonstrates daily. This means, as one of Coover’s characters points out that “The end of the world, Mr. Jenkins, is not an event; it is a kind of knowledge.” This knowledge seems unique to the culture of efficiency which correctly predicts its own inevitable demise - there is only one most efficient survivor after all. One wonders what the sequel to Day of Wrath might reveal about its further evolution... or it’s fading remnants.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

It started in April last year in a small bookstore here in San Francisco. Prior to reading excerpts from The Brunist Day of Wrath, Robert Coover told the small crowd that he returned to the subject matter of his first book The Origin of the Brunists, some four decades later, as his need to respond to the election of “little Bush” and the neocon vanguard sweeping into American government. I imagine over the ten years that it took him to write this novel Coover would weep and gnash teeth that the world-rending realities of the Bush administration could barely keep pace with any apocalyptic fictional musings he could put to paper. For we have such a sorry history of what happens when you combine fundamentalist religious beliefs with government, and the realities often outpace the fictions.

Although Wrath was published nearly half a century after Origin, the first novel feels more like a prequel than this one its sequel. This book is Coover’s Hamlet, his David Copperfield. He’s constructed something monumental in these 1,000 pages that serve as a timeless reminder, as only a work of fiction can, that the stories we choose to believe can be deadly. Every major world religion comes packed with apocalyptic endings to this world; attempting to have rational discourse with a true believer about the dangerous lunacy of these prophecies is a no-win prospect. Fundamentalism is at its heart a dialectically unassailable position. I know this because for 30+ years I was a true believer.

Borrowing the thought from Barnes, I don’t believe in God, but sometimes I miss him. The husk of my discarded fundamental Christian faith occasionally gives me phantom aches the way I imagine amputees might feel about a lost limb. I grew up in a household where words like eschatology, narthex and ecumenical were bandied about in normal conversation. I’ve laid hands on a sick sister with the rest of my family while she was anointed with oil by a minister, all of us praying for her healing. I’ve fasted countless times, converted the lost, tithed to the church and yes, prayed for the end of the world and for Christ to come into his kingdom. I left that world for good more than a decade ago - Wrath is the first thing I have read that created a triggering event that made me feel so very depressingly awful about that prior life. I’m not ashamed of the person I used to be, I’m just now so much more aware of how shabby those beliefs are seeing them on display.

Coover’s inclusion of all types of people on the faith spectrum is one of the things I love about this work. He inhabits the minds of dozens of West Condoners and writes beautiful sentences describing every subject from the Brunists to seeking employment in the dying town. Sally Elliott is the star of the book; we enter into this world-gone-mad via her light touch cynicism and genuine good hearted nature. She’s trying to figure this all out, just as the reader is, and she wants to do so without turning her atheism into just another religion. It is beautiful to watch her actions exemplify all of the better tenets of Christian charity and brotherly love without the world crushing side effects of that religion.

Coover shows us throughout the work what our brand of Americana does to our souls. The reap of our sow is on display at every headline update, every US Weekly turned page. And true, it isn’t just America's brand of scorched earth Christianity that is currently on stage – we have ISIS and countless other religions wanting to tilt the planet towards end-of-days, but responsibility starts at home. Coover isn’t telling us to feed our Bibles to the fire, he’s asking us to be more like Sally Elliott. Because Didion is right, we do tell ourselves stories to live, but we also tell ourselves stories to kill. Until our species has learned how not to do the latter we had better be damned sure we are reading the right stories to live. Stories like The Brunist Day of Wrath.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

My intention was to begin with evidence that the so-called 90 page test made famous by folks such as Ford Madox Ford and William H. Gass and other prose-centric fictionists is falsified when one considers the novel qua novel, a polyphonic performance amidst the dialogic multiplicity of languages and voices, an orchestration of multiplicity which shows up the 90 page test as an external standard brought to bear upon something which in its what-ness is not sufficiently one-dimensional to submit to such an arbitrary standard. But Mala beat me to it.

What I mean here is the simple lesson that a novel such as Wrath of the Brunists which is constructed via a plurality of shifting points of view among its cast of characters (as large as 150 actors on this stage), that when the point of view shifts so too does the prose, the material presence of the word on the page sounding in the reader’s inner ear, the presence and absence of musicality or poetical-like prose determined as it is by the presence of the character’s voice leaking into the space naively identified as the space of an all-sovereign narrator, that in such an instance, the prose presented on an arbitrarily determined sampling will indicate nothing beyond the sound and form of the prose as presented through that single element, a single element among a multiplicity. One does not judge a symphony on the basis of the adagio movement.

Why harp upon this? Because the experience of reading Wrath of the Brunists is a peculiar experience, an experience made peculiar by the expectations created by the presence of the name “Coover” on the cover of this thick book. Coover can do things with words on the page like very very few prose-creators can do. A practitioner of the utter outer reaches of prose pyrotechnics. Read almost anything by him ; there is some kind of standing award for the reader who might locate a dislocated word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, story, or novel. But Wrath, like Coover’s Origin of the Brunists, is written by what this reader of experimental, post-Wakean fiction is inclined to describe as “straight” fiction, conventional. My first experience with Coover was the disoriented experience of Pricksongs and Descants ; Wrath is closer to the small town Iowa I grew up in. And it is a straight portrayal of small town USofA ; and it’s sick.

Lucky Pierre? Nope. The Public Burning? Closer ; but therefrom one must subtract all but the Nixon chapters. What I’m thinking of here is Evan Dara’s small town threatened by a foreign intruder which is more intimate than ex-timate in The Lost Scrapbook, but with less of the blur among subjective pov and experience ; I’m thinking of the fun Neal Stephenson’s post-1999 novels once brought to the intelligent reader looking for something for the beach ; and, yes, from my limited reading of this kind of novel, I must also compare Wrath with the post-apocalyptic attempt to (re)construct a community in Stephen King’s The Stand. In other words, a straight smart novel written to be read, presented to the reader in engaging and accessible portions, which, were it not published by an underfunded small press (Dzanc Books) would have already 4013 gr-ratings this day, four days after publication.

That’s really about all I’ve got to say folks. And I’ll justify my saying no more in this manner -- a) aside from the fact that Dzanc has published this novel and thus it will not be sitting in stacks at The Village Bookshop when you first walk through the door (Oh! This looks good!) no one is reading this wonderful novel because b) You and the Rest are still catching up, reading Origins, which is the correct thing to do. Most certainly do read Origins first, and take copious notes as to characters, etc. c) Anything I say about this novel might count as a spoiler. I’ve already said too much by saying that it’s a straight novel like its prequel ; some of us expecting Pierre-level pyrotechnics. d) Since you won’t read Wrath until you’ve read Origins, and You and the Rest are already reading Origins because you simply can’t wait to get your eyes on Wrath, you will have learned everything you need to know in order to approach Wrath. In short, get yourself a copy of Wrath so as when later in the Spring/Summer when you head down to the beach you’ll have something you’ll really actually want to read without being bored ; it is that kind of 1000-pager.



_________
page 90, first paragraph :: 

Their general all-purpose Meeting Hall--church, dining hall, school room, offices--was converted from the old camp lodge, built early in the century in the days of rustic grandeur with heavy beams and stone walls and foundations. It was solid still except for the roof, which needed to be stripped to the rafters and rebuilt, and it was up on the roof the Hunk proved as invaluable as Wayne Shawcross has been on electricity. Though a big man with a lot of belly ballast, Hunk is agile and fearless in high places and he can command work crews with blunt authority and can lift the weight of three men. Once the building was tight and could shelter them, Ben installed a coal stove at the back and hung Coleman lanterns from the beams. Their brothers and sisters from Randolph Junction, still in touch with Hiram Clegg, presented them with a fine old upright piano. Ely’s final message in its gilt frame now hangs by the fireplace, alongside the Prophet’s “Seven Words” on a wooden plaque, created by some South Carolina youngsters with a woodburning kit, and a framed near-lifesize photograph of their late Prophet standing in the rain on the Mount of Redemption, a mine pick over his shoulder, his hand raised in a blessing. The Meeting Hall is where their Easter service was held this morning, celebrating Christ's triumph over death, and where tonight’s candlelight prayer meeting will be. It is beautiful and it is hallowed by their labor and it anchors them.

So then there’s prose there to judge. Is it predictive of the novel qua novel? No.

[Rick Harsch · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpQn9...

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Coover's first novel, The Origin of the Brunists, was published in 1966. It concerns itself with a doomsday cult centered around the lone survivor of a coal mine accident in the American midwest. The inspiration was a 1961 mine disaster in Carbondale, Illinois. After successes with his early novels, Coover turned to the metafictions and experimental novels for which he's most widely known. The Brunist Day of Wrath is a sequel to the first novel. It takes place five years after the apocalyptic events attending the Brunist rise as a cult, and it chronicles an apocalypse of its own. The novel marks a return to Coover's original style of satirical naturalism. He still has the knack.

One of Coover's major themes in his long career has been religion and its relationship with myth. The novel is about fundamentalism, evangelism, and Pentecostal millenarianism. His satirical voice is critical of such movements. The character Sally Elliott, as atheist, is the voice of reason and understanding and might represent Coover himself since the novel's long afterword is the account of how she wrote the nonfiction novel describing the cult's return to the place of its origins and the second vigil for the end of the world.

At 1005 pages, this is a huge novel. It's populated by a huge, cacophonous crowd of characters, too. In the "Epilogue," when Sally Elliott's writing her novel, Coover himself writes, "Putting characters in was not what was hard, she realized. It was keeping them out." Such a din of voices is a Coover signature. They and their homespun language make for a raucous populism. They even sing songs, their lyrics spatter the novel. A character list would have been helpful. A shorter novel might have made sense, but his story filled every one of its 1000 pages without my being aware of padding. Trimming might have been most useful in the 45-page "Epilogue" detailing how Sally Elliott wrote her novel. But I thought this, rather than being excessive, was Coover nodding toward the construction of The Brunist Day of Wrath and therefore nodding toward his own affinity for metafiction. Whether or not it's too long, I finally thought it quite an achievement.

[Forrest Gander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Books have been described as roller coasters before, but none so aptly as this one. For one thing, for the first several hundred pages, it's just one crank after another. Then comes the visceral, half-sickening thrill, the swooping dive into pure pandemonium. Towards the end, there's a hairpin turn-- suddenly we're reading a fiction about the fiction we've read. And then, on the last page, we pop through into another dimension.

It's a brilliant cultural and political indictment served up in appallingly hilarious American vernacular-- spoken by those cranks mentioned earlier-- for which no one has a better ear than Coover. The sentences are often so high strung you want to swing on them twice, but we're used to that with Coover. With The Brunist Day of Wrath, the truly incredible thing is the structure. Yes, yes, the end meets the beginning, that too, but it's the orchestration of so many voices that is the most remarkable achievement! The Canterbury Tales was a warm-up for Coover's cantankerous, confused, rapturous pilgrims, and come to think of it, Coover may be our postmodern Chaucer.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I find myself approaching the middle of December having just completed my tenth Robert Coover book of the year. This whole process was kicked off when I tore ecstatically through THE ORIGIN OF THE BRUNISTS in March, my whole world revolutionized. The process of pursuing this what-I-keep-calling 'Coover completist kick' has led me to the point where I feel compelled to bluntly declare him the greatest of the great. While I would still hold William Gaddis to be America's great literary giant, he kind of peaked with his debut, and part of the true pleasure of getting deep into Coover this year (especially having started off w/ THE ORIGIN OF THE BRUNISTS and ended w/ its forty-eight-year-later direct successor) has been developing an abiding wonder at the majestic (nearly flawless, divine) arch of his career. Having now read all of his books save one, and having read so many in such close proximity to one another, I feel I have an appreciation of Coover right now that simply dwarfs any expansive-wise appreciation I have ever had for any other writer of fiction. I would say that my favourite of his works would have to be JOHN'S WIFE followed closely by GERALD'S PARTY and THE ADVENTURES OF LUCKY PIERRE: DIRECTOR'S CUT. The reason I don't include the Brunist novels in that list is because I see them as somehow slightly peripheral to the rest of his body of work, giving special, exquisite definition to that body, serving as counterpoint to it, and appearing as they do w/ that vast separation of years (the first at the very beginning, the latter very near the end). Many comment on the fundamentally 'realist' nature of the Brunist novels, a designation which I find reductive (not to say repugnant). Reality is a leviathan, to say that the conventional novel (essentially born - or at least perfected - in the 19th century) somehow provides some mimesis of reality is absurd. That being said, the Brunist novels do demonstrate an atypical (for Coover) fidelity to the traditional 19th-century-perfected novel. They are mammoth and virtuosic achievements in the realms of plotting and characterization. They are inarguably among the most un-put-downable texts I have ever encountered. THE BRUNIST DAY OF WRATH is, however, not entirely without postmodern credentials (how could it be?). It is a magnificent network novel (culminating in staggering, orgiastic, polyphonic mayhem). Ultimately the insanity and evangelical mania it castigates and rebukes become not a matter of the incredibly distinct and dynamic individual personages rendered within these pages, but a sickness of the network itself. The way legal culpability becomes addressed in this context ultimately reveals Coover (a writer often capable or being raucously, hilariously mean-spirited) as a writer of great compassion; an apologist for each fallible one of us, deserving as we are, ultimately, of a reprieve.

[Kevin Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had a feeling that The Brunist Day of Wrath would be just a tad better than its predecessor. But wow! A true testament to how continuous work to your craft will only make you one of the best. And in Robert Cover’s case, one of the best writers alive. This book is an amalgam of all that can be (and at many times, is) with The USA. Timely as heck! And so impressive that a novelist can revisit characters from a book he wrote 40+ years earlier.

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

What, exactly, should we make of a thousand page long realist novel, the main point of which seems to be the undercutting of the realist novel and religious belief--the kind of belief that the narrative voice would have us associate with the realist novel? It could be that this is the start of something new. Wesley, who is either possessed by Jesus or mad, thinks to himself "this is not merely a post-Christian or post-historical world, as some of those people you've been reading say, it is a post-world world," (55-6). The truth that this new Jesus brings is: "We are not, but only think we are. Our actions are nothing more than the mechanical rituals of the mindless dead. This is the truth. Go forth and prophesy," (56). BDW could be the origin of this new understanding of literature and/or religion: quasi-Nietzschean, French-Heideggerian, the great individual will go forth and create the new world.

In the first Brunist book, the liberal-intellectual is represented by Tiger Miller; here, we have his elective descendent, Sally, who recalls Darren* saying that the religious calling is an invisible form calling out for substance. "Now she writes: The writer's vocation: An invisible form calling out for substance." So, religion, and writing.

True, it's hard to know how seriously we should take Sally, though. So much of her writing, and thought, is just re-hashed sophomore Theory, in which the individual is always right and any barriers to her free expression of freeness is tyranny. E.g., she thinks "about teleological fantasies. The madness of 'grand narratives': history going somewhere," (923). Lest that little squib escape your notice, Sally later tells Mrs. Filbert that
"People are caught up in a dangerously insane story and they don't know how to get out of it."
"Dangerous? Just only stories?"
"Most dangerous things are."
"... Can they, you know, kill somebody?"
"Sure they can. What's the toll now from all this madness? You might say story has killed them all," 958-9.

And if you doubt the link between religion and realism, Sally is there to point out that "the conventional way of telling stories is itself a kind of religion, you know, a dogmatic belief in a certain type of human perception as the only valid one. Like religious people, conventional writers follow hand-me-down catechisms and look upon the human story through a particular narrow lens... conventional writers are no more realists than these fundamentalist Rapture nuts are. The true realists are the lens-breakers, always have been. The readers, like your average Sunday morning churchgoers, can't keep up with all this, so the innovators who are cutting the real mainstream often go unnoticed in their own time. It's the price they pay. They don't make as much money, but they have more fun," 648.**

Jesus preaches more or less the same liberal individualism--"Blessed are the fantasists for they shall not be dismayed by oblivion... But damned are they who project their mad fantasies upon others," 891. Sally, Jesus and Coover all come to praise the individual genius artist and damn institutions.

Thankfully, there is some nuance here. Our implied author acknowledges the similarities between fiction and religion, both modes of life that claim to offer "lies that were truer than truths," that both offer myths, which are "not falsifications of history, but rather a special kind of language for grasping realities beyond time and space," 673-4, with the difference being, of course that fiction's truths are truer than the truths of religion, which are simply false.

To pull this claim off, the book needs to perform: this work of fiction needs to be evidently truer than the truths of religion, more effectively mythical. It does have a nice story to tell: religious cult develops, returns to the scene of its origins, chaos ensues with much symbolic violence between all factions of American life (except the Liberal Artist, who calmly watches from the sidelines).

But sadly, the book doesn't live up to its narrative. BDW is certainly smarter than most of the realist novels you'll read; it is also less entertaining, not substantially better written, and adds little to my life that I wouldn't have gotten from, say Franzen's Freedom--god is dead, the individual is all that matters, live in this world rather than hoping for a better one etc etc...

So I suspect that BDW is not the beginning of anything; rather, it is the end. I have a hard time imagining that anybody will ever again produce such a massive attempt to meta-criticize the realist novel. I also have a hard time imagining that I would want to read any such attempt. The time has come to move on from the doctrines, methods and preoccupations of this book, and the writers of Coover's generation. We all know that traditional realism is boring, and bankrupt, and that it will continue to exist because it's kind of enjoyable.*** We get it. Can we do something else, now?

................................

* There are hundreds of characters in this book, and for the most part they're easy enough to track. Don't try tracking them in this review, though.
** My heart bleeds for the overlooked Professor emeritus of Brown University, who only has fifteen books in print. How poor he must be, but also, how fun.
*** There are some interesting parallels between this book and some great works of not-quite-realism: the parade scene reminds me of Madame Bovary, for instance; I'm fairly sure there are references to Blood Meridian--one of the bikers renames himself 'Kid' and goes on a journey; later, someone is killed by a giant man's bear-hug at a toilet (see the end of McCarthy's novel).

[Geoff]

So I saw this big bastard on the bookshelves at Politics and Prose a couple-three days ago and thought it looked like it oughta come home with me. I didn't pick it up but I'm wondering, should a guy like me have to read the Origin of ThemThere Brunists first to get what's going on in this one? Or could I just mosey on in?

[Simon Robs · Rating 5 out of 5]

They're back .. those nutty Brunists and their end-of-days ways and means again the subject for this 14 years later sequel to the 1st "Origin/Brunists" book, Coover supposedly spurned out of a radical dislike of Dubya Bush presidency - sheesh, wonder what the hell in a hand basket would Hair Rump conjure up?! But so, wacky rapture freaks are at it again in West Condon stirring up another meltdown ruckus this time with biker gangs and local fanatical quasi-militias thrown into the eventual fiery caldron that signifies the wrath of God's fulfillment, but not just yet. Coover sneaks into the act with his stand-in, a writerly girl named Sally who is and is not narrator, "The true realists are the lens-breakers, always have been. The readers, like your average Sunday morning churchgoers, can't keep up with all this, so the innovators who are cutting the real mainstream often go unnoticed in their own time." And this book is a masterly imagining of place and time flushed out with dialed in characters wrapped in events spinning out of control. Sally again, "Language makes and unmakes reality. There's an unfathomable gap between nature and culture, the infinite and the finite. Only the imagination can even try to bridge it. Its failures are what beauty is. And so on." Sally/Coover go on to describe the process of writing a book about the events of this book thus veering on into that meta remove, but here it is, thing. All in. This book, all in!

[Neil Griffin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm starting to think that Coover will be known as a canonical author in the decades to come. He's definitely appreciated now, but he is still pushed aside too often when talking about post-WW2 literature. My thought is that his work should be taken as seriously (if not more) than folks like Updike, Roth, and the other "serious" writers. Actually, fuck it, he beats Updike easily.

This could be the book to truly cement his reputation. THe problem is that I have seen very little marketing or buzz about this, which is pretty disheartening. This is a book that runs circles around a lot of the mass-fiction books out there that sell millions of copies. It beats them at their own game while also being extremely well-written and having something intelligent to say about religion and the damage it does.

This book is particularly relevant during this time of religious warfare in the world and shows how this plays out using West Condon, a generic midwestern city circa 1960-70, as a microcosm, or microcondon, of this violent impulse. This book is paced brilliantly, written carefully, and thought provoking. Even though it's a sequel, to his first book written almost half a century ago, I think it should stand up for any body who doesn't want to read the original.

It's definitely an interesting book when you compare it to his more playful and genre-breaking fiction and truly shows that he's somebody who could have made a career off a totally different style of fiction than that which he usually practices.

[Parker Douglas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked it better than his first Brunist novel, which I love.

[Marc · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sure, this is a sequel to The Origin of the Brunists, but it's not necessary to have read that book first... Or rather, you might read that book instead. It's been more than a decade since I read the first book (published 1966) and my memory preserves but an outline. But what I remember was a much tighter story with more bite. This novel picks up five years after the last one ended. The shattered remnants of a fundamentalist Christian fringe group calling themselves the Brunists (named after a half-mad survivor of a mine explosion that decimated smalltown West Condon's psyche and economy in the first book) have come back to their spiritual and group "home" for a second try at the "Rapture". And while it would be easy for a writer like Coover to merely hoist the fundamentalists upon their own petards, he's an equal-opportunity kinda satirist and spares no one.

As Coover has aged, his insights have only become keener, but I believe his compassion has grown deeper, as well. Even as he pulls the curtains back to reveal the mechanics that make this foolish facade of a life appear functional, he never lets the reader forget we're all stuck on this same stage and most of our roles have been cast as farce. And on this particular stage, his production requires a full four intermissions. This book is epic in size (just over 1,000 pgs) and scope using West Condon as a kind of window into America's working-class, white soul: the disappearance of jobs, the corruption of those in power, the worship of money, the delusions of the individual, coming to terms with aging bodies and the looming spectre of death, and a reactionary religiosity offering the mirage of salvation.

"One's destiny in smalltown middle America: Death by submersion in a pot of boiling clichés."

Coover immerses the reader with such vivid characters and details that one feels West Condon come to life. His humor and irreverence are in full force: the immaculate conception construed as a type of rape, a new country western duo rising to prominence on a song called "The Night My Daddy Loved Me Too Much", a minister who uses his belief in himself as the second coming of Christ to score free meals in town, a sassy young "faction" (fact+fiction) writer who wears cheeky t-shirts with quotes from H.L. Mencken like "Deep within the Heart of Every Evangelist Lies the Wreck of a Car Salesman", and a motor cycle gang drawing armageddon-plan inspiration from comic books. The pace borders on plodding but performs mostly as a slow burn allowing for everything plus the kitchen sink. Coover routinely delivers such such bon mots as:

"One is deprived of full contact with reality by the flaw of hope."

But also takes full advantage of the space for lengthier delvings like this one from the town's banker:

"Money. What is it? He doesn't know. He defines himself by it, but it's still a mystery. Like the Holy Spirit. It exists and doesn't exist. You have to take it on faith. If it were more visible, more logical, it might not work. But it's completely irrational. We use numbers to mask that, as the dispensation of grace. A delusion that works. Stacy's definition of religion. Not his, but he can live with it. That people see money as the very opposite of the Holy Spirit, as something diabolical, also makes sense. Money as Mammon. Trying to do good with it is mostly a losing proposition. What's happening here in the bank. Big mistake. Or, rather, "good" in finance means something else. The Golden Rule doesn't operate here. Misguided generosity is a kind of wickedness. Loose morals. Failure to foreclose is an infidelity. But if "good" is not the same thing as the Golden Rule, it's not the opposite either. The system requires exchange to work, and exchange involves give-and-take. Some kind of honor code. I'll believe if you believe, I'll spend if you'll spend. It's how we keep ticking along, using up the world. Misers are sinners who constipate the system. To win it all is to lose it all. Sweeping the Monopoly board is like the end of the world; to continue, you have to redistribute and start over. Another Big Bang, so to speak. Expand and contract, expand and contract, the eternal cycle of the universe. Sames as the business cycle. You can't legislate it--there's nothing there to legislate--but you can profit off the swings. If you're a believer."

Coover is probably best known of his experimental and meta-fictional writings, so there's a kind of irony at work here with him returning to more traditional story-telling--in fact, story retelling, as this is essentially the same story as the first book with newer characters, sharper wit, the wisdom of Coover's years, and a second chance to indict politics and religion thanks to an extra 500+ pages. At one point, a young writer in the story says,

"The conventional way of telling stories is itself a kind of religion, you know, a dogmatic belief in a certain type of human perception as the only valid one. Like religious people, conventional writers follow hand-me-down catechisms and look upon the human story through a particular narrow lens, not crafted by them and belonging to generations of writers long dead. So conventional writers are no more realists than these fundamentalist Rapture nuts are. The true realists are the lens-breakers, always have been. The readers, like your average Sunday morning churchgoers, can't keep up with all this, so the innovators who are cutting the real mainstream often go unnoticed in their own time. It's the price they pay. They don't make as much money, but they have more fun."

My reaction to this and to Coover:

Dear Dirty Uncle Bob,
If this is your Book of Revelations, I'm sorry we couldn't keep up with you and you chose to have less fun.
Your nephew,
The Reader

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Forget Gilead as the likeliest outcome of the tense present. The nation as imagined by Atwood, not by any Robinson. Coover returns a generation later to his Pennsylvania town. He has matured. Where Origin of the Brunists felt like Updike crossed with Percy as far as its reckless male lead wooed the local broads, Return tightens the drama, and eases up on the Sixties satirical smirk. Although as in most depictions of all hell let loose, the climax wasn't as apocalyptic as dystopian-loving me wanted, Coover commendably creates a convincing Christian-ish cult as it sets up camp and causes the bikers, among scofflaws and secular sinners, to engineer their own petards for hoisting as Judgment Day looms. This time around, the Brunists get taken more seriously and their millennarian affectations come with weightier cargo of a sinister, stealthy sort.

[Bill Shackleford · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just finished "The Brunist Day of Wrath". While I can understand the normal reader's reluctance to pick up a book of 1,000 pages, particularly since this one is pegged as a sequel about a end-of-time cult, my honest assessment is that BDW is an incredibly well-written, harrowing and humorous novel. The title seems ironic, particularly when viewed by the epilogue.

Coover has developed many characters who latch onto the reader's attention and make him anxious to know how they ended up. My favorite is Sally Elliott, known by various names such as the female Antichrist and Goose Girl. Her observations are barbed and hilarious. Coming in second are the appalling Dot Blaurock and her family of pestilential children. Dot enters midway through the book and causes the reader to be repulsed and then later to laugh aloud with the outrageousness of the situations they embrace. Third place is held by the Presbyterian minister, Rev Edwards, who has a schizophrenic break and slides into a strange rendition of the Beatitudes among other antics. For other characters, such as the lovely Angela Bonali and the LPN with a fractured vocabulary, the humor is mixed with sympathy.

Be cautioned: the violence is appalling and visual in the imagination.

[Glen · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I say?? 5 stars may be all you need to know. I loved this read. I had my public library order it for me so I admit when I picked it up I was a bit overwhelmed by what I was about to undertake. Could Coover keep my interest for over one thousand pages? The answer was an adamant yes. Every word he used was necessary in the telling of his tale. I will now seek out the book that introduced the Brunists to the world almost 50 years ago. Can't wait!!!!

[Heather Bennett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Coover is a unique writer and has a wonderful talent of weaving a tale. This is the first time I have read one of his books and I did enjoy it. His story is complex and has many great characters. This book may seem imposing for a few readers out there being over one thousand pages, but it is worth the read. I now will read the first part of this story.

[Dougj · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imaginative and compelling. A wild ride through a world of evangelicals, cultists, bikers and small town political hacks.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very strange and extremely long book. Notwithstanding this, it has a rhythm and is ultimately a compelling read.

[Jason Kerns · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Deborah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am only at the 40% mark, but I don't know when I'm going to finish it. It is longer than I expected, which would not ordinarily be a problem, but it suffers from the fact it was published before its prequel, The Origin of the Brunists. The Brunist Day of Wrath would have been easier to follow, and therefore more attention-gripping, had I been able to read the books in order.

I received a free copy of The Brunist Day of Wrath through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Postscript: The Origin of the Brunists was published on May 27, 2014. Now that it is available, I will try to read it and then finish The Brunist Day of Wrath. If I do so, I will update this review.

[Rod · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have made my way within the last year through the full story of the Brunists across two novels and many early morning immersions in West Condon life. This holds so much that I find captivating, looking at how story builds on story and is interpreted and reinterpreted in religious communities; how cults take hold; the natural tendency to imagine oneself persecuted; the inclination to imagine intricate as-yet-undiscovered-by-the-many truths being suddenly revealed...I found myself anxious to get done (it is over a thousand pages after all), but now feel a little nostalgic for the tragically-screwed-up residents of this small town, and regretting there will be no more novels coming from Coover.

[Sofia]

With next-day delivery this should arrive on my birthday, how thoughtful!

[Thomas Dennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prophetic

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magisterial, sweeping, biting, witty, complex, this book starts out with a bang and keeps on going. It is an outstanding analysis and meditation on one of the unique characteristics of american society - evangelicalism. There are parallels elsewhere in the world of religious fundamentalism but the United States has a unique spin that unfortunately has become a real destructive force. The weird naivete of the coming apocalypse and Rapture actually affects US policy at the highest levels (e.g. the crazy Repulican support of Israel based on expectations of the Second Coming of Jesus). I imagine this crazy yearning for death and resurrection has its roots from the very founding of our country by religious zealots.

Even though our family was mainstream protestant, I grew up in a region awash with cults drenched with eschatological beliefs, so the story aligns with my own personal history and interests ... and the story is gripping. I couldn't put the book down and, given it's a thousand pages, I dropped a few a balls reading it.

The religious philosophy laced through the book is quite thoughtful as well. One quote, for example, 'Jesus knows he was born into death, beginnings contain their own endings and are contained by them'. This is consistent with the most recent physics that time is a complete dimension and that our experience of it as unfolding is an illusion. The theology of the book is quite fun and yet serious at the same time. The T-shirts of Sally Elliot (one of the characters) makes the book worth reading on its own, e.g. Faith is believing what you know ain't so - Mark Twain

His dipiction of evangelicals feels so accurate that I have to believe he grew up directly exposed to them. Anyone who wants to get an in depth understanding the 'Guns God and Glory' communities in rural US would be well rewarded reading this book.

Great read.

[Charles Cohen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why does this book exist? And WHY is it 1,000 pages???

Coover goes through all the themes he dealt with in The Origin, and other than claiming that history isn't cyclical, it's a whirlpool, circling and circling but always headed further down, there's not much that's new here. I was going to rank these even lower, but the ending almost saved it, when it's clearer that Sally is Coover's stand-in. It's only then I really felt that Coover started to love a character, something he did more clearly in The Origin, and what I thought was missing from this go round.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hmm. How to rate a book that is fantastic for 850 pages, then goes off the rails into absurd nonsense for the next 100, pitting psychotic bikers with explosives vs police helicopters with rocket launchers like a a Call of Duty match?

The last 50 pages is about trying to get a book published.

What the heck?