A Cold Winds Blows Across The American Mindscape

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	• An analysis of the effects of gender and race on salary for the regular-scale faculty: Report Carol A Chetkovich University of California at Berkeley, Office of the Faculty Assistant on the Status of Women, 1991 average customer review:based on 39 reviews
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highly recommended

Quite good

Compare to Booker-nominated Keepers of Truth, this new novel by Michael Collins is less suspenseful but not necessary inferior. The theme of how middle-class Midwestern Americans live and survive is again explored by Irishman Collins. The protaganist travelled cross-country with his wife and 2 step-children to find out the mystery surrounding his uncle's death and to unearth secrets surrounding the fire that killed his own parents many years earlier.
Collins vividly painted a bleak landscape where middle-class Americans passed their time enduring cold weather, diner food, TV dinners, and countless reruns of old TV shows. The protaganist's cousin Norman lost his mind and the family farm under the bleak backdrop of Michigan. The sanity of Frank Cassidy is also questioned: what is real and what isn't? Who really set the fire that killed his parents? Who is the comatose man who allegedly is the suspect in the murder of Uncle Ward? What is his relations to Frank? The answers to these questions slowly unraveled as Collins explored the pysche of middle-classed Americans.

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A Cold Winds Blows Across The American Mindscape

In truly stunning, brutal, and visceral terms, The Resurrectionists goes to the heart of the American psyche. This is novel of suspense, indeed, a brilliant use of plot/mystery, but to an entirely different end that most writers use the genre.
This novel defies category. It's a novel and an intellectual rift on America, on the Cold War, on TV, on the Dead Penalty, on Regression Therapy... It's all here in a hodgepodge way that somehow works, since the narrator is a psychological disturbed man. His rift, his excesses, his rants thread a surreal journey through the America of the Nixon Years and backtracking to the birth of the Cold War.
The effect is disorienting at times, but fascinating. Collins' use of language and turn of phrase keeps you reading for the sheer enjoyment of a line by line reading.
If you want something out of the ordinary, this is it...

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Creepy Mystery Pays Off

It's hard to like Frank Cassidy at the beginning of The Resurrectionist. He's sardonic, broke, a loser, and pseudo-philospher all rolled into one. His only redeeming quality is his love for his child, Ernie. It took me and all in my reading group forty pages before we could sympathize with Frank. This in retropsect is a tribute to the book. Collins has crafted a slice of American that we wince at, or try to avoid. The sense of desperation Frank felt was discussed in terms of our present day economy, a man, finding himself in economic ruination, can turn violent. We see it on the news so often. Here we come face to face with that psychopathic undercurrent that may run through most of us, when cornered.
It's not pretty, but so true to life. The hostage scene with Melvin stands as one of the truly great set pieces we've read in years, an approximation of horror and then reconciliation. How Frank changes and saves Melvin works so cinematically. It is the turning point on an odyssey that is becomes both suspenseful and human. The resolution to the mystery element was totally unseen, but worked brilliantly.
This was truly a creepy yet satisfying novel, one that crossed many different genres, yet somehow held together. However, it's not for the feint of heart.

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Mysteries wrapped into snow

This book seems to start out on the wrong foot. It is narrated by Frank Cassidy, somebody with only a rudimentary education on the lower rungs of life. You wonder where he gets all that penny-ante philosophy and the flight of lyrics from: "We were all nobodies at our essence". Or "The silver scratches of falling rain". That kind of writing can be irritating.

But, later, we meet up with the characters of the book, such as as the wife Honey and the children Robert Lee and `Ernie, Franks uncle Ward Cassidy, the neighbors Sam and Chester Green, the psychiatrist Dr. Brown, Ward's son Norman and his wife Martha. They all are what you would call "damaged goods". The mystery at the center of the story is: Who killed Frank's parents who dies in the arson of their home. And what goes on with "The Sleeper", who lies in a waking coma at the local hospital. And who killed Ward Cassidy?

The story is told with great skill, lifting the vail of a snowy landscape only a little at a time, keeping you guessing. You get a feeling of floating along with it, never able to penetrate the various mysteries. In that respect, it is a great novel.

The solution to it all comes on the last few pages. It makes convoluted sense, but is far from satisfying. The novel might have more impact if it had been told straight forward, without Frank's ruminations.

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Bone Chilling Social Realism

Wow. This is the darkest, most surreal novel you'll read in a long time. It had to be written by an outsider, i.e, an Irishman!
Scary for its authenticity and vision of America...The ending, tying a Nixon quote to the metaphor for the book shows the intellectual verve and power of the writing. This is a social thriller, an amalgam of Steinbeck and Elmor Leonard. He says more in this novel that maybe any American writer I've read!

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

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