American Desert: A Novel - Hardcover

Everett, Percival

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786869178 ISBN 13: 9780786869176

Publisher: Hachette Books, 2004

Synopsis

Part parable, part fantasy novel, part laugh-out-loud satire, American Desert is the story of Theodore Street, a college professor on the brink of committing suicide. When the decision is taken out of his hands--he's hit by a car and his head is severed from his body--he must come to terms with himself.

At his funeral, he sits up in his own coffin with the stitches that bind his head to his body clearly visible. Everyone is horrified by this resurrection. He becomes a source of fear and embarrassment to his daughter, and an object of derision and morbid curiosity to the press and the scientific communities, and is anointed as a sort of devil by an obscure religious cult. In the process, Theodore manages to reestablish his relationship with his estranged wife and family and to rediscover the value of his life.

In this experimental, satirical, and bizarre novel, critically acclaimed author Percival Everett once again takes on the assumptions of a culture whose priorities have gone out of whack. He lampoons the press, religion, and academia while offering, ultimately, an existential meditation of what constitutes being alive.

About this title

About the Author

Percival Everett is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.

From The Washington Post

Theodore Street -- wayward husband, neglectful father, failed academic -- is having one hell of a midlife crisis. Not long after he fails to get tenure, and after admitting his latest infidelity to his long-suffering wife, he heads for the beach to commit suicide -- he plans to walk into the surf and drown, like Norman Maine in "A Star Is Born." Then, in a freak automobile accident, he is thrown through the windshield of his vintage sports car and decapitated. And as if that weren't bad enough, three days later -- the statutory period for a resurrection -- Street, his head sutured roughly back onto his torso, sits up in the coffin at his own funeral. In direct contradiction of the old F. Scott Fitzgerald chestnut that there are no second acts in American lives, Ted Street starts his second act with a bang.

The novel that follows this arresting opening is rather like its protagonist, a bit of a Frankenstein's monster. Percival Everett, the author of 15 previous books, is one of the most adventurously experimental of modern American novelists. He's written realistic fiction, but he's best known for gleefully postmodern books like Glyph, narrated by a child prodigy in the style of post-structuralist theory, and Erasure, in which a brainy black author (a lot like Everett) cynically writes a stereotypical ghetto novel (under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh) that becomes a bestseller. Like Erasure, which combined a satire of the cultural politics of race with a straightforward family drama, American Desert pulls in two directions at once: It wants to be a freewheeling satire of American life and the story of a man's unexpected second chance to make things right for the people he's hurt. The result is rather roughly sutured, like the head on Ted Street's torso.

Surprisingly, given the acuity of Everett's earlier satires, the satirical half of this novel, while never less than entertaining, is simultaneously too busy and rather attenuated. After being besieged in his home by the rabid tabloid media, Street is kidnapped by a Christian Identity-style survivalist cult, who think he's the Antichrist. Then he's kidnapped again by a super-secret government agency out of "The X-Files," which whisks Street away in a black helicopter to an underground base near Roswell, N.M., where a renegade scientist is researching the military uses of resurrection.

Everett effortlessly moves from low comedy in the scenes with the cult -- where the leader is planning to fend off the ATF with Civil War-era cannons and Gatling guns -- to something more cerebral and astringent in the Roswell scenes, where Street comes across a government project that's too fiendishly clever on Everett's part for me to give away here. And, given Street's unique predicament, there's a fair amount of gruesome black comedy, especially in the scene where Street, who feels no pain and needs no anesthesia, stays awake during his own autopsy. (Think about that next time you're having a procedure done at the doctor's office.) In the end, though, too many of Everett's jokes are too obvious -- giving the cult leader the name "Big Daddy," for example, or a vapidly ambitious TV newswoman the surname "Barbie" -- and the objects of the satire are more peripheral to American life and less urgently ridiculed than the subjects of some of his earlier books.

What does work well, however -- surprisingly so, given the book's fundamentally fantastic premise -- is Street's struggle to cope with his family's reaction to his plight. Apart from Street himself, the novel's most successfully realized characters are his wife, Gloria, and his children, Emily and Perry. Indeed, after Street disappears into the American desert (read: wilderness), Gloria and the children come even more vividly to life. Apart from the bizarre premise, their struggle to cope with what their husband and father has put them through, both before and after his resurrection, could be a portrait of any family coping with a crisis, and, as such, it makes for more compelling reading than the novel's flashier, more manic sequences.

But the novel works well on another level, too, namely in its depiction of Street's struggle with the physical reality of his post-mortem "life." This is not a science fiction novel; Street spends a lot of time pondering whether he's really alive or not, but Everett never explains how it happened. Strictly speaking, as a philosophical investigation of what it means to be alive, Street's story is not particularly resonant because -- let's be honest -- his isn't a situation that's likely to come up very often.

But reading the novel as a kind of fable, and Street's resurrection as a metaphor for a man's midlife crisis, is much more fruitful. Because the irony is that Ted Street is a better man dead than he ever was alive -- more honest, more attentive to his family, more altruistic generally and even a better lover to his wife (which is still a little creepy when you think about it). He apologizes sincerely for his past behavior, does his best to rectify his errors and even engages in some rather cinematic heroism before the end of the book. And, in a very moving climax, combining grief, regret and resignation, he comes to an epiphany that will be instantly recognizable to men and women of a certain age -- that, given enough time and provocation, we can all learn to be decent, but that decency almost always comes too late. The irony of this ungainly but ultimately satisfying novel is that while Street's head works but his heart doesn't beat, his story works the other way around: The head's a little lazy, but its heart beats strong.

Reviewed by James Hynes

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hachette Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0786869178
• ISBN 13: 9780786869176
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304