Erik Raschke. The Book of Samuel. New York: St. Martin's, 2009. 264 pages. Paperback. $9.99. Website: http://thebookofsamuel.com/.
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Plato's famous observation in The Symposium that both progeny and publishing can be considered gestures toward creating something immortal has always been insightful. As unquestionable founder of Western arts and letters (and I'm not talking here about the Bible which can hardly be termed "belletristic"), Plato was probably on to something. And I'm sure he considered flesh-and-blood productions "ontologically" inferior to books, or literary works, that "live forever." Plato was an "idealist." The Symposium was not about learning how to, as Stephen Stils might say, "love the one you're with" or the kid(s) you've got, but about transmuting base metals into gold, so to speak through art.
But what if art and life in the Platonic sense become not so much indistinguishable as interchangeable? What if your own progeny makes the same gesture by publishing something "immortal" himself? And what if he is immortalizing someone, or something, that isn't simply either "real" or "ideal", but (as Jacques Derrida would call it) impossible. The Derridean "impossible," as the now immortal philosopher of postmodernity and so-called "deconstructive" readings of texts employs the term, has nothing to do with not being able to do or accomplish something. It has to do with discerning the presence of a space of meaning and signification that is neither here nor there, neither within nor without, neither internal nor internal, neither physical nor spiritual, neither (to use big philosophical words) "immanent" nor "transcendent".
The impossible is, as Derrida suggests, a specter. It haunts us. Like all specters, it is a force that impinges constantly on our lives without ever really manifesting, or materializing. Like the ghost of Hamlet's father in Shakespeare's "immortal" (I won't keep pushing that trope, I promise) play by the same name, Derrida's specter "manifests" at times of transition, confusion, doubt, "in-betweenness", when the "times are out of joint." Derrida develops the notion of the "specter" in his book from the late 1980s entitled Specters of Marx. The specter haunts us because it vaguely reminds us of the past, but also intimates something which we can feel in the air, which is both now and therefore, as Derrida would say, "messianic." The Kingdom of Here is both now and not-yet. It is both present and "to come."
The impossible haunts us at in such ways in such in-between and out-of-joint-times, at "such a time as this". And this book is definitely haunting at this time.
The young hero of The Book of Samuel (a book about a kid named "Samuel," Samuel Gerard) is himself an "in-betweener," or "tweener" for short. The book adopts the actual title of an in-between book of the Bible, which is about the time in-between the golden age of ancient Israel's tribal democracy and the worldly and increasingly corrupt monarchy. The book is set in an aging, lower middle class, almost exclusively white, pre-gentrified neighborhood of Denver, Colorado during the early 1980s, in the salad days of what conservatives nowadays nostalgically dub "Ronald Reagan's America."
We used to refer to tweeners as "pre-teens," but now we know that this age for both boys and girls is equally about being "pre-" and "post-." It is also post-childhood. The no longer and not yet. That's why a little over a generation ago we started renaming every "junior high" as a "middle school." This strange combination of "pre-" and "post", this no longer yet still to come, or "to become", is often described as the time of "coming of age." Indeed, that's how many of the somewhat formulaic blurbs or reviews of this book online have described it - a "coming of age novel."
What exactly does it mean to "come of age"? Usually, it's about losing one's innocence and discovering sex. It can also involve a sense of being suddenly marginalized in terms of emotions and physical appearance, of entering "the awkward age," to employ a threadbare and quite inconsequential standard descriptor. But it's not merely coincidental that pre-literate - and sometimes even highly literate - societies have ancient ceremonies performed at this time of life for "coming of age," what are known as rites of passage. The very concept of "passage" implies transition, in-betweenness.
The famous anthropologist Victor Turner characterized these ceremonies as accentuating what he called the "liminal space" of life at this time. The word "liminal" derives from the Latin limen, which can mean "threshhold" or "boundary line." In this space of in-betweenness it is sometimes almost impossible to distinguish order from chaos, and the confusion is deliberately and strategically enshrined in the rites themselves.
In the Roman empire the word referred to the invisible boundary line (usually a river) between "civilization" and the "barbarian" realms. Roman legions were garrisoned there (modern European cities such as Frankfurt and Vienna were originally such outposts) in order to prevent order from absorbing chaos, or barbarism from penetrating the limina that marked the boundary of civilization. It is the very nature of a limen, however, to be temporary, to collapse in the face of penetration by the threatening "other" from "over there", beyond the limen. In The Book of Samuel the liminal "river" is what the middle schoolers term "the gulch" (actually, the Harvard Gulch, which is not a river so much as a drainage area that separates certain neighborhoods in South Denver), and the "other" are what the boys deliberately refers to, both generically and provocatively, as "the Mexicans."
The gulch is where Samuel and his two young friends, Jesse and Jonathon, go to enjoy the "innocent" sport of bike jumping, in which they've engaged throughout grade. It is a place all their own that is betwixt and between, away from school, away from parents, away from the dysfunctionality of white, working class family life which the book often portrays, humorously as well as poignantly, in the manner of the old "Archie Bunker" series from the same era. But the gulch is haunted with the specters of change. Jonathon is the angry and the defensive one, the one that senses the change, who acts as the garrison against the growing onslaught. Jonathan goes to the gulch routinely not just to have fun, but to "fight" the onslaught.
"I'm sorry about today," he said, finally. "You're like my best friend. You don't want to fight. Some things you can't change. You don't want to fight. Okay."
"He stood.
"Where are you going?"
"This doesn't feel like my gulch anymore."
"Why? Because of the Mexicans." (p. 256)...
There were so many Mexicans now, all gathering around. More and more. Gravitating.
'Jonathon.'" (p. 257)
In the book "the Mexicans", a phrase that will grate on the politically correct and hypersensitive but is necessary to underscore the rigidity of the false sense of "otherness" that occupying the limen without any awareness of its liminality fosters, are the specter of how this in-betweeness comes to be resolved in the surprise ending, in a powerful way.
But The Book of Samuel has far less to do with the sociology of transition, and the intractability of race prejudice, than it does with the "liminality" of the spiritual rites of passage of our age - from Jesus-freak, reformed-hippie, Bible-quoting, evangelical Christianity to one which is now and not yet, that is avenir (in French-speaking Derredese) "to come." It is the passage of the Christianity which, culturally speaking founded the Reagan era and reached its apogee in the age of George W. Bush, but now finds itself awash in a strange, culturally diverse, globalized, world-flattened, increasingly upside-down, spectrally threatening, morally ambiguous, and increasingly violent environment.
It is an "impossible" Christianity, which Samuel at first and rather unsuccessfully seeks to find in the mutterings - somewhere between prophetic and purely apocalyptic - of his post-Sixties, Jesus-freak father, who has quite his job as a psychology professor to "save the world", but in the end discovers unintentionally and in an unforeseen way through his own unplanned "apocalypse."
I will have more to say about this kind of Christianity in a soon-forthcoming, follow-up post as well as in a future meditation about what the novel says about my generation, and the generation that is supposed to now succeed it. I've always been a critic of my own generation - the Boomers and self-righteous post-Vietnammers - but I've also been a critic of the much vaunted "millennials", who were supposed to save the world too. The author, my son, is neither a boomer or a millennial. He's an "X"er, that undesignated "liminal" generation that we can't easily make sense of. The Xers are now approaching middle age, another "in between" time, so whatever wisdom they can offer to us has to be read between the lines of the always-to-fail conventional wisdom.
The Book of Samuel was designated by the publisher as a "teen novel," but it really goes beyond that. It's really an "in-between" novel that can be read with relish by 20-somethings, 30-somethings, and 40-somethings alike. It's easy to read. And it compels. Furthermore, it grows on you, and you have to re-read it. Your kids can read it and perhaps chuckle at the pure juvenalia of it all, as in that other Colorado creation known as "South Park." Or you adults can read it and begin to unpeel the deeper layers of irony and meaning.
Samuel Gerard is indeed a present day, postmodern Huck Finn. And like Mark Twain's immortal character (shoot, I said it again) he is not only a mischievous, irrepressible, hormone-saturated argonaut of his own times, but the secret conscience of our age. I'm not sure what the "religious" people of our day will do with the book (none of the "Christian" publishers were remotely interested in it). Nor am I sure what the fashionably non-religious will do either (it doesn't glorify any of our stock, identity-political victim heroes, nor villify any of our stock, identity-political, "oppressor" bad guys). There's no theology in the book, just truth. It's only in those in-between spaces that truth, God, or the meaning of life can be genuinely discovered.
But what do I know? I'm just in-between the book and the author - somewhere.
More to come...
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