BOOKS OF THE TIMES
'A Prayer for the Dying': A Godly Man Called Jacob, in a Plague's Crucible
By RICHARD EDER
 A PRAYER FOR THE DYING By Stewart O'Nan. 195 pages. Henry Holt. $22.  |
he terrifying compression of Stewart O'Nan's novella of mortality triggers a synapse of memory: the lines by the Elizabethan poet Thomas Nashe:
The plague full swift goes by;
I am sick, I must dye . . .
I am sick, I must dye . . .
"A Prayer for the Dying" uses different lines for its epigraph, from Albert Camus: "There is no escape in a time of plague. We must choose to either love or to hate God." It accomplishes a closer thematic job; it does not come as close as Nashe to suggesting the cold bronze hammer-blows of O'Nan's writing.
It must seem like critical hypertrophy -- quibbling with the epigraph for goodness' sake -- but there is a point. As parables should and rarely do, O'Nan's plague story has so much that is implicit and hollowed out, so much emptiness between the sentences, that the reader is called upon to enter, invent and rearrange. A parable is a vacuum that sucks you in. Only great artfulness manages the seal. O'Nan, a young writer of unusual range and variety, is a master of voices and the place they resonate from, of human rhythms and the universal rhythms they cut across.
"A Prayer for the Dying" uses the Wisconsin countryside of the late 1860s for its setting instead of Camus' Oran, and diphtheria instead of bubonic plague. ("Prayer," in the metaphysical anguish that hovers through its particular agony, is of course a grandchild of "The Plague." I take leave of the comparison: Grandchildren get to be considered for themselves.)
The mines around the town of Friendship are played out; heat sears and bleaches the land, and ragged Civil War veterans still straggle through. The conflict's horrors shadow the book. They obsess Jacob, the driven narrator, who saw his companions starve and go mad in the course of a long siege between the armies. Throughout Friendship's destruction by diphtheria, fear and then fire, it is as if the war, having died out, had come back as a ghost, to punish.
Yet, at the start, Jacob's voice is fresh and redolent:
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"High summer and Friendship's quiet. The men tend the shimmering fields. Children tramp the woods, wade the creeks, sound the cool ponds. ... The only sound's the freight drumming through to the south, tossing its plume of cinders above the treetops, the trucks clicking a mile off. Then quiet, the buzz of insects, the breathless afternoon. Cows twitch and flick.
"You like it like this, the bright, languid days."
Note the "you." As the story spins down its vortex, the pronoun acquires meaning. Jacob, who tries desperately to maintain hope and faith and finally loses, cannot bear his own "I" and lays it aside. (Conceive Job punished so far as to have to think of himself in the second person.) Even before we notice this, we sense doom in Jacob's initially exuberant account. He is, he tells us, the town sheriff. He is the minister. He is the undertaker.
This wacky accumulation expresses his obsession: Out of the destruction of the war, when God seemed to have vanished, Jacob is determined to reinvent Him. He cares for his town as God is supposed to care for the world: He punishes transgressions, provides faith for the living and passage for the dead. "Credo quia absurdum" -- the classic religious formula of, roughly, "I believe even to absurdity" -- becomes, as horrors multiply, its own horror: I believe right on into madness.
With a shivery economy of means and a dreadful lavishness of effect, O'Nan advances the horror on parallel tracks, the growth of the epidemic and the disintegration of Jacob. The former begins with the discovery of a dead soldier, then a maddened cow, then the awful suicide -- throats burned through with poison -- of the cow's owners. Deaths occur one by one, then by clusters, as the bell ringer works to exhaustion tolling the age of each of the victims.
The doctor makes his rounds and Jacob goes with him; at first as undertaker and then, as the corpses mount, as sheriff. He puts up quarantine signs, bolts a rebellious woman into her house, burns down the house of a dead man, noticing too late an old woman's desperate face at an upper window. With the sheriff of the next town he enforces the quarantine at the town line. Surreally, a circus parade arrives, mechanically tootling, and the elephant in a dust cloud. As the wagons are turned, one by one, Jacob braces himself for the drivers to protest.
"None of them do, except the elephant, who leaves a single cannonball of a dropping as he swings around; it raises a puff of dust, then sits there like an insult as the tinny music fades."
The scenes grow more terrible. Townspeople rebel, try to break through by force. There are shootings and an ending, produced by a forest fire that engulfs the town, like the Apocalypse.
More affecting and harsher than all of this is Jacob's own pulling apart. He cannot bear his degrading, the process by which he must give up the sacramental care he brings to the dead as undertaker and his pastoral care for the living. Only the sheriff remains in him, enforcing an increasingly mad notion of order and belief.
Amelia, his baby daughter, dies, and then Marta, his wife. (She coughs at breakfast; pink spots flower suddenly in the milk jug.) He sits them in chairs, embalmed, chats with them in the evenings, bathes Marta and in despairing denial, makes love to her. A sample of the Bosch-like domestic scene:
"After dinner Marta plays the melodeon and the two of you sing. She falls off the stool but you prop her up, set her feet on the pedals, her fingers on the keys, help her find middle C. 'Jesus Our Redeemer. He Will Come in Glory for Me."'
Yet O'Nan has much more in mind than twin horrors, external and interior. If Jacob, trying to be the God of love, becomes the God of retribution, the spiral does not stop there. His madness is not all of him; there is a bleak awareness at the same time, and this is what makes "A Prayer" more than a brilliant exercise of darkness.
Clinging to his faith, Jacob disputes it as well. Here is one of his tortured arguments with himself:
" 'It's not right,' you say.
"Who are you angry with?
"Not God
"No? Who else is there? Is this the devil's work?
"It must be, you think, but uncertainly."
It is the problem of belief: how to reconcile God with evil. O'Nan carries it further. In Jacob he has the believer, torn. He has God, as well: struggling in despair with the same problem.
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