A mystery lies at the heart of the novel. Frank's parents died in a fire when he was five, and, through hypnosis and, eventually, treatment for a breakdown, he's come to believe that he and his uncle were both involved in these deaths in some way. Returning to "a town nobody returns to unless under tragic circumstances," Frank starts digging into the past and disrupting lives.
On the level of plot alone, the novel is full of excitement, enhanced by vibrant characters with whom one feels great empathy as they wrestle against the circumstances that keep them down, bending the rules, if not breaking them, whenever they can. The vividly described, remote farm environment, the mores of the local community, and the treacherous winter weather generate much of the action and interaction. Collins expands the scope of the novel well beyond plot and melodrama, however, by recreating the ambience of the 1970's and using Richard Nixon, Watergate, and Jim Jones as thematic motifs which recur throughout the novel and show parallels with his characters and story. As the title indicates, this is also a novel with religious parallels, so well integrated that many readers may not even notice them, at first. The Prodigal Son, the Book of Job, and the story of Lot's wife are fairly obvious, while the Parable of the Loaves and Fishes (in this case a trick in which one hits a Coke machine at the right moment to get both the Coke and the money back) may be less so. References to good and evil, hope and despair, death and rebirth, and salvation and resurrection occur throughout, as Frank and his family adapt to life in a small town, try to cope with their internal conflicts, and ultimately to come out ahead.
A beautifully developed novel of big ideas, The Resurrectionists is engaging and, to me, totally satisfying on every level. Though I enjoyed Collins's Keepers of Truth, I liked this novel even better--it's one of my favorites of the year. Mary Whipple
Beginning as a road novel, the book moved across America, a journey back in time, from the heat of New Jersey to the refrigerator cold of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. This is one of the most ambitious novels you will read this year, or any year.What is at the heart of this "Cold War Story" is the uncovering of Truth, a recurrent theme in Collins' work. The conceit in the book is that our history was kept from us during the paranoia of the Cold War politics, both by our political leaders, Nixon and Co. Everybody in the book is reacting in someway to Nixon's betrayal in the book. Frank, the main character has a adopted son Robert Lee who has a Nixon pez despenser, his father who's on death row killed the people he did in the wake of watching the Watergate hearings. Also, at work is the fact that uncovering history, or finding the Truth is almost impossible. Things become jumbled, we have to rely on people to tell us what happened, therefore, history is open to interpretation. All this may sound too intellectual, but garbed in the story and characters Collins presents, the allegory works brilliantly. Throughout the book, the use of reruns is masterfully manipulated, so that themes, and moments have a deja vu feel. The main character, having been a victim of Shock Treatment and hypnosis for an event he witnessed as a child, is unreliable, and his sense of history is skewed. For much of the book, we wonder if we are getting the real "Truth."
With so many divergent themes that do come together, it's hard encapsulating this book. There's the Sleeper, the comatose figure who murdered a man who lies dormant. What secrets does he hold? There's the main character working through his own memories of the past, there's the wife with the ex-husband, a guy on death row who wants to be executed, who is giving his organs up to his hosts. His wife fears he will come after her in the body of one of these hosts. Mixing the surreal, the gothic, the crime genre, the literary novel, Collins gives us a virtuoso performance, an outside looking in at us. This is by all accounts a near literary masterpiece of emotional and psychological fallout, a starkly told and often brutal and political novel, but for all its apparent bleakness, it is a novel of hope. It shows in quite an extraordinary way toward the end, how we Americans survive. How Collins pulls off this twist, how he gets himself out of the mire of despair is again testimony to his insight into the American Condition.
What Collins has done is taken a strain of gritty realism with its focus on violence, loss, struggle, day-to-day survival, giving us an almost documentary footage rawness of real life. These characters at their worst,are despicable, but at their best the shine with such humanity that we can, if not forgive, at least understand the stain of madness and violence that runs throughout most of the book. What is so brilliant and unsettling is how when you put the book down, it's then that its undertone of political and social critique resurrects itself. It's like the aftertaste of a fine wine. That the book can live on these two levels, that its very structure and content always plays with the visible and the invisible, with the surface and the buried, is truly remarkable. This is a book to read twice, once for the mystery, the second time to ruminate on just how many things this book addresses.