First Make Mad: A Novel

First Make Mad is a day’s journey into the soul of Roman Moran. A father and a fisherman, a writer and a grocery store clerk, a sinner and a mystic, Roman makes his way through a single Ash Wednesday in the curious town of Hot Springs, Arkansas. There the ghosts of gangsters and Native Americans whisper on the mist-wreathed mountainsides, and the dead of Roman’s own family form a chorus such as Odysseus might have heard as he coursed over the Mediterranean Sea. The odyssey of the Moran family, though here told only in brief, is replete with its own cast of monsters and maidens, prophecies and visions, and descents into the realm of the dead. In the end, it confronts the mystery of the ways of men and women, of the return home and the renewed ascent of the marriage bed in the face of a world shot through with grace but subject still to the power of death.

Daniel Fitzpatrick is the editor of Joie de Vivre and a teacher at Jesuit high school in New Orleans. He is the author of the novel Only the Lover Sings, a verse translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, and Restoring the Lord's Day.