Wasting Your Life in a Small, Redneck Town? Here's the salve

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	• The Keepers of Truth: A Novel Michael Collins Phoenix House, 2001 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 42 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Wasting Your Life in a Small, Redneck Town? Here's the salve

I picked up Keepers of the Truth after going to amazon.com and adding some books to my reading list. All the reviewers were saying things to the effect that the guy's very underrated, and one even went as far as to say that KotT is better than Franzen's book.
Now that I'm 85 pages into it, I wish that I had read it before his lecture tour. He does make some interesting analogies, particularly his juxtaposition of a bathroom stall and a confessional. Also, I now have this desire to ask him what he thinks of Bruce Springsteen's role in the working world: an emotional salve or a revolutionary much in the vein of Collins as a writer.
I think that as age advances on him, he will at least gain contentment that this book will be added to required reading lists through the Midwest (or maybe just along the Coasts).
The book seemed like it was just going to be some surrealistic ... when he started talking about workers in stained yellow shirts with buckets of beer. His characters have since demonstrated the worth of the book. I think my brother might enjoy the text as well, since Collins seems to have Hunter's flare for the gauche.

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Unsettling Genius

NPR does a great service in bringing us voices that we may otherwise never hear. Michael Collins is one such voice. Hailed in Europe and lauded with prizes, I'd never heard of him. In his interview he gave such a personal account of his struggle and survival in America as a young immigrant, that I decided to read his book. He seemed to suggest that we as a nation had lost our ability to think politically, to react to world affairs. Needless to say, I bristled at this contention. I wanted to ask him why he stayed?
I can't say I agree with everything in this book, but it is an uncanny vision of America, a re-vision of past events overlayed with some heavy, but insightful analysis of us as a country. His contention that over 20,000 people were murdered and this constituted an undeclared revolution within America in the early eighties now seemed more insightful than when I first heard the figure. Collins contended in the interview that Americans were apt to dismiss this figure as gang related, to mitigate the level of violence to a subgroup of our nation. However, in The Keepers of Truth he has created the emotional and political landscape of America, peopled it with all the hopes and fears we share. He shows the rise and fall of characters, not always their own fault, but victims of society, and we are asked to have humanity and understanding for those who fail, and indeed, in this book, failure seems inevitable, or at least decline. (It is hard to decide what I feel about this contention.)
Collins raises serious societal issues in of all genres to adopt, a crime, or mystery novel, and he pulls it off with such verve of language, suspense and pace, that one had to give him his moments on the soapbox. As a denizen of the midwest I can vouch for at least the atmosphere and tension Collins creates. It is a startling achievement for a foreigner to understand, or maybe, not understand, but question us with such probing questions.

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Excellent, Dark Vision of America

I thought The Keepers of Truth was excellent, a very well-told story of crumbling Americana circa late70s-early eighties. The novel takes place in a dying industrial town in the mid-west. The narrator, Bill is in his early twenties, wealthy in the sense that his ancestors in the town left him with a mansion, and writes for the local newspaper. Bill makes most cynics look like Pollyanna, yet is an engaging narrator, telling a compelling story. Old man Lawton is reported missing by his son Ronny. Murder is suspected and Ronny is the main suspect. Bill becomes obsessed with Lawton's disappearance, becoming involved with those he suspects may be involved in the murder, Ronny, who realizes near celebrity status after being accused, Ronny's ex-wife, who seems more concered about who will get the Lawton family home than anything else, and several other characters from this small town. Collins' vision of America is dark and unseemly. The novel is really a fabulous dark comedy, psychological drama and crime novel rolled into one. And it works, it works fabulously well.

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Compelling

This is a sad, dark novel with sad, dark characters. Beautifully written with very real people and scenes of harrowing behavior by otherwise ordinary people. The elevation of suspected murderer Ronny Lawton to local folk hero at Denny's, where he becomes employee of the month as a result of his sudden popularity among the high school crowd is frightening in the depth of its truth. Bill, the young narrator, is a lost, desperately lonely man whose life has become a twisted, painful thing because of an absence of familial love; a man whose grandfather was a tyrannical self-made immigrant millionaire and whose father was a suicide. Bill is brilliant, almost too aware of society deconstructing before his eyes, and a truly touching character.

The major problem I had with this book was the time frame. The references are all over the map and at most points the story would appear to be set in the 70s; yet there are references forward in time that confuse the issue so that one is left wondering if there are anachronisms on the page or if one has misunderstood the time frame. Given the significance of Vietnam to the story, I had trouble determining just when the action was taking place.

That said, this is well worth reading--particularly Bill's fascination with Lucas, the child of Ronny Lawton's "estranged"--as she is referred to throughout the book--with whom Bill becomes involved, almost against his will. At the end, there is the hope that Bill will rescue little Lucas from a fate too similar to his own. And that is something remarkably uplifting in a book that is so very grim.
Recommended.

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gripping mystery

This sleeper that never quite caught the public eye has been shortlisted for all major literary awards, Booker and IMPAC. It's a tour de force, a retrospective look at our America, or indeed Western Civilization, in the latter part of the 20th Century. Filled with brilliant philosphical insights, and a true murder mystery, Collins has created one of the most interesting hybrid fictions I have ever read. He focuses on the monumental dismantling and reconstruction of our world from a manufacturing base, to a service sector economy. The sense of displacement, anger, but ultimate sense of hope in the book is a realistic portrait of the social and psychological pangs we all went through as America changed in the late seventies.
This book was our unanamious choice as book of the year in our book club.

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reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

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