The Eternal Footman - Hardcover

Morrow, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151293252 ISBN 13: 9780151293254

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999

Synopsis

The Eternal Footman completes Morrow's darkly comic trilogy about God's untimely demise. With God's skull in orbit, competing with the moon, a plague of "death awareness" spreads across the Western hemisphere. As the United States sinks into apocalypse, two people fight to preserve life and sanity. One is Nora Burkhart, a schoolteacher who will stop at nothing to save her only son, Kevin. The other is the genius sculptor Gerard Korty, who struggles to create a masterwork that will heal the metaphysical wounds of the age. A few highlights: a bloody battle on a New Jersey golf course between Jews and anti-Semites; a theater troupe's stirring dramatization of the Gilgamesh epic; and a debate between Martin Luther and Erasmus. Morrow also gives us his most chilling villain ever: Dr. Adrian Lucido, founder of a new pagan church in Mexico and inventor of a cure worse than any disease.

About this title

Review

"Homo sapiens is an amazing animal.... Get God and Aristotle off its back, and miracles start becoming the norm," theorizes a hapless human in James Morrow's The Eternal Footman. Capping off the hilarious trilogy that began with Towing Jehovah and Blameless in Abaddon, Footman tells the story of what happens after God is undeniably dead. If His giant, deteriorating corpse in the first two novels wasn't enough, now His holy skull stares down from orbit like a melancholy moon, offering daily proof to the Western world that there's nobody left to pray to.

Cirrus clouds rimmed God's skull. He appeared to be wearing a white toupee. At least there weren't any ads today. Why the Vatican permitted the multinationals to aim their lasers at His brow was a mystery she couldn't fathom. Contemplating the Cranium Dei was depressing enough. You shouldn't have to read COKE IS IT in the bargain.

Depressing? That's not the half of it, as Judeo-Christians, sure at last that nothing but blackness awaits beyond death, become "Nietzsche-positive" and are stalked by the leering embodiments of personal apocalypse. Nora Burkhart's son Kevin is the first of millions to succumb to the awful symptoms of abulia, the fatal result of death-awareness. Western civilization crumbles while Nora struggles to take her comatose son to a legendary clinic in Mexico, where a strange, powerful man is rumored to have a cure. Meanwhile, a spiritual sculptor finds inspiration in a new pantheon after his masterpiece is mangled by the Vatican--but the new gods may require the ultimate sacrifice.

This is James Morrow, after all, and despair is always accompanied by enlightenment in his satirical morality tales. Taking cues from Dante, the legend of Gilgamesh, and an imagined debate between Erasmus and Martin Luther, Morrow finds redemption for humanity in the simplest acts of decency. Giant stone brains, God's evil intestines, and the still-guilty captain of the oil-spilling tanker Valparaiso make memorable appearances in The Eternal Footman, a worthy finish to Morrow's trilogy, and a fair but passionate defense of "the West's greatest gift to the world, the miraculous faculty of rational doubt." --Therese Littleton

About the Author

James Morrow does his writing in a self-built library in his home in State College, PennsylvaniA. In his spare time, he collects Lionel electric trains and videocassettes of vulgar biblical spectacles.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0151293252
• ISBN 13: 9780151293254
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 359