The Enchanted

AGENDA:

Read Ch. 1 and post a response to Q. 1

http://www.readinggroupguides.com/reviews/the-enchanted/excerpt

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18090147-the-enchanted

http://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/13-fiction/9694-enchanted-denfeld 




1. The novel opens with the line, "This is an enchanted place. Others don't see it but I do." The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word "enchant" as, "to attract and hold the attention of (someone) by being interesting, pretty, etc.; to put a magic spell on (someone or something)." Why does the narrator call this place enchanted? What beauty does he find in his surroundings that others do not? What does this tell us about the narrator?

2. Talk about the main characters: the narrator, the lady, the priest, and York, the prisoner on death row at the center of the story. How are these characters' lives and their fates intrinsically connected? What do we learn about the lady and the priest from the narrator?

3. Why does York want to die and why does the lady want to save him? Is he worth saving? How does she go about gathering evidence to understand his case, knowledge that might prevent his execution? What propels her choice at the novel's end?

4. Think about York. What were your first impressions about him when he's introduced? As you discovered more about his story, did your outlook towards him change? How does the experience of investigating York's past affect the lady and her outlook towards York? How does it shape how she sees her own life?

5. What draws the lady and the priest to one another? Why do you think each chose the career they pursued? How do their callings sustain them emotionally? Are they good at what they do—even if the priest is himself fallen from grace?

6. What has being locked inside done to the narrator—and for him? What about some of the other prisoners he watches? Do you believe in rehabilitation? Do you think our prison system today encourages rehabilitation? Is there something else we can do besides imprison those who commit crimes?

7. One of the Ten Commandments is "thou shalt not kill." Isn't executing someone—even someone who committed a heinous crime such as taking another's life—going against morality? Why is the death penalty still used in the United States compared to most other modern democracies?

8. Do you believe that we are products of our circumstances? How much can free will mitigate terrible damage that inflicted in a person's youth, when he or she is most vulnerable and impressionable? Why do people do such terrible things to each other and to innocent children? "There is too much pain in the world, that's the problem," the lady tells the priest. What causes so much of the world's pain and can we, both individually and as a society, do to help alleviate this suffering? How much responsibility do we carry for our fellow men and women?

9. What do you think is the worst punishment that the prisoners in the novel face being locked away? "It is meaning that drives most people forward into time and it is meaning that reminds them of the past, so they know where they are in the universe. But what about men like me? For us time doesn't exist." Think about time in your life and in the narrator's. How do you respond to him? What can give a life that is not measured by the events of time real meaning? How is such a life measured? Think about not being able to touch someone or see the sky. How would that affect you for a day? A week? A year? A lifetime?

10. What happens to people when they are incarcerated? How can we make the prison system more humane? Should it be humane or do convicts, regardless of the level of their crimes, "deserve what they get"? As a society, do we see prison more as punishment or as retribution? How can we save people from having failed lives? Is it possible to save someone?

11. Do you think that death offers release for men like York and the narrator? Did they find peace?

12. Like the lady, Rene Denfeld is a fact investigator in death penalty cases. How do you think her work shaped the story? Did reading The Enchanted alter your view of prison?

13. Rene Denfeld touches on many issues and themes: Mental illness, justice, time, kindness, remorse, forgiveness, the need for love and connection, life and death itself. Choose one or two and trace them through the novel, using examples from the novel to enrich your analysis.

14. Why did you choose to read this novel? Did the novel surprise you in any way? Explain why or why not. What did you take away from reading The Enchanted?
(Questions published by the publisher.)

Writers and Books Discussion Points

http://wab.org/rr-2017-the-enchanted-discussion-points/

The Enchanted interview

Book Talk with Rene Denfeld

By Fiona Ortiz

(Reuters) - Non-fiction writer Rene Denfeld draws on her work as a death penalty investigator in her first novel, "The Enchanted", the story of a prisoner who invents a horrible, liberating beauty deep underground.

Although he doesn't even have a window in his cell, the first-person narrator imagines life on the outside, especially that of a character known as "the lady" who works to redeem death-row prisoners, much as Denfeld does in real life.

In the end all of the characters in "The Enchanted" turn out to be prisoners in one way or another. Perhaps the freest of all is the walled-in narrator, whose disturbed fantasy life leads to a poetic sort of justice.

As a licensed investigator since 2008 Denfeld has interviewed prisoners, on and off death row, and traveled to "the worst parts of the country and the worst streets and homes" to find friends, relatives and teachers who might help her clients avoid or overturn a death sentence.

"The Enchanted" comes after Denfeld's non-fiction books including "The New Victorians", about victimism in the women's movement, and female aggression and violence in "Kill the Body, the Head Will Fall".

Denfeld, from Portland, Oregon, lived on the streets when she was 15, sang in local punk bands, worked as a bartender and journalist, has done amateur boxing and is a mother to three children she adopted from foster care.

Denfeld spoke to Reuters by phone from her home in Portland, about her new book, released in March by HarperCollins.

Q: I learned a lot about prisons from "The Enchanted", much of it disturbing. But it is also a very poetic book. How did you achieve a blend of lyrical and didactic?

A: I wasn't expecting to write a novel, the story came about. I had written non-fiction books and started doing this work as an investigator. The work existed in this magic, special place because I knew I couldn't write about it in a non-fiction way, because it is confidential and privileged. By using the narrator's voice I was able to tell the truth of his prison and of these people, and to do it in a way that captured his particular love of language and this gorgeous poetry flowed out of him. It wasn't that I set out to blend the two, but it happened in a way that felt very authentic.

Q: Is the novel now feeding back into your work as an investigator in some way?

A: I think the novel helped me crystallise and understand the things I witness; it helped me clarify where my own heart was in my work and the nature of my work and I feel blessed to do this work, it gives me a lot of insight. People honor me with their stories and their truth, I get to bear witness to a lot of things.

Q: Can you describe your transition to fiction?

A: What happened was I was leaving the prison in Oregon that has a death row. It's like an ancient stone fortress. It was a beautiful day, and I was walking out to my car after visiting a client on the row. I heard a voice tell me: "This is an enchanted place." And I very slowly followed the voice into the novel. I felt the narrator was telling me the story and I had to transcribe it. The transition felt so completely natural to me. I felt the act of telling fiction allowed me to tell a deeper and more complex set of truths than I've been able to tell in non-fiction. I was able to set aside my ego and opinions and thoughts and tell the story.

Q: Do you hope to inspire prison reform with the novel?

A: The entire time I was writing the novel I didn't tell anyone I was doing it. I didn't give a thought to anyone reading it. I didn't actually give any thought to that. It wasn't meant to be an advocacy book, it was meant to tell the truth of the narrator. The issue of the corrupt guard and what he does to the character called the white-haired boy, that happens and that is the truth.

Q: Is the prison in the novel based on a particular prison? You describe something called the Dugdemona Cage where death row inmates are chained for visits with lawyers and investigators. Does that exist?

A: The narrator is based on all the clients I've had and the prison is based on all the prisons and jails I've visited. One thing that is common is the cage that was described. It's a cage that looks like something out of "Silence of the Lambs".

Q: Why are some characters named and others are not?

A: The men on the row are all named, most of the inmates are named, but the people that work outside, the lady, the warden, the priest, they are largely unnamed. For the narrator, they are like mythical creatures. They live lives that he can only imagine. The usual construct in our society is that prisoners are nameless, but inside a prison that's their world and the people outside are the nameless ones. I've noticed we tend to make these people invisible. Thousands of people go into these places and effectively disappear.

Q: Books are a salvation for the narrator. Have you seen that really happen to prisoners?

A: A lot of people are illiterate when they go in. It's not until they do a terrible thing that they start learning to read. It's heartbreaking because through books they realize they had other choices, there were other possibilities, other lives they could have lived. They discover all this too late.

(Editing by Michael Roddy)

More of same--Prayer for the Dying, Scholastic

AGENDA:

Essays

Second person short stories
Scholastic, Sokol, Gannon

STAY WARM!

Prayer for the Dying TEST

Prayer for the Dying Essay Test

Today, read over the following discussion questions and write a thoughtful response to one of them in essay form.    Develop your response using specific examples from the book.  You may use your book, of course. Length: at least 1 page single spaced using text references cited in MLA format

These questions require thoughtful answers focused on what O'Nan has written (AP English students take note of Question #5!).  How does this novel relate to other works you have read in or outside class this year--? A little critical lens practice, perhaps, in comparison and contrast?)...

Link to blog:

http://thelibrarium.wordpress.com/2006/11/24/discussion-starters-for-a-prayer-for-the-dying/

1)  A Prayer for the Dying uses as its epigraph a quote from Albert Camus: “There is no escape in a time of plague. We must choose to either love or to hate God.”  How does A Prayer for the Dying illustrate this quote?  Do you believe that Camus is correct in presenting the choice we must make in such stark terms?
—– 
2) Richard Eder, in his review of A Prayer for the Dying, writes:

[Jacob Hanson, the protagonist] 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.

What are your feelings about Jacob’s descent into madness?  When did you first recognize that all was not well with him?  Can religious belief become absurd, and do you see evidence of Eder’s contention above in the book?  And, can religious faith not only descend into absurdity, but even madness? 
—– 
3) Eder also goes on to state, “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.”

Eder concludes with, “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.” 
I know that a book discussion forum is too limiting a place for a full expose on the problem of God and evil, but what does O’Nan say about this problem in A Prayer for the Dying?  
—–
4) Patrick McGrath in his review in the NY Times reminds us of O’Nan’s use of the second person singular and present tense in his writing:  

O’Nan has employed a surprising but ultimately successful narrative technique for Jacob’s story: it is told throughout in the second-person singular and the present tense. Thus Jacob’s references to himself as ”you” have a self-distancing effect; it is as if he doesn’t fully occupy his own being and observes himself from some other place. He is both in his own experience and outside of it. This is a fine perspective for a narrator who will be forced to move from the orderly, predictable contentment of his life in a placid 19th-century farm town to confront the appalling prospect of chaos and destruction as the people around him sicken and die and the brush fires advance ever closer.

Stewart O’Nan once said 

“I mean, I could’ve written, I think, Prayer for the Dying, in first person but it probably wouldn’t work nearly as well. This particular character has this overdeveloped sort of superego and it’s always sort of accusing him. No matter how well he’s doing it’s always sort of saying, “You’re screwing up, you’re screwing up, even though he wants to be this perfect, blameless person, so it fits him perfectly.”

In another interview, O’Nan says:

For A Prayer I needed an intimate narrator capable of fairly hiding things from the reader. So I knew it had to be a first- or second-person, because a third- who’s unreliable is kind of cheating. I tried the first, and it was too close. I was reading Robert O’Connor’s Buffalo Soldiers, written in the second person, and noticed how the voice scourged its owner, tapping him on the shoulder whenever he’s doing wrong, like a conscience or superego. It’s the same use of the second as in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City, or Charles Johnson’s story “Moving Pictures.” And I thought: what effect would that scourging, nagging, blaming voice have if it were inside a man doing everything he could to prevent a terrible, unavoidable catastrophe? Especially a man who loves his town and feels responsible for everything and everyone. And as I wrote further into the story, I noticed that the voice would veer close to Jacob and then stand apart from him, accusing, and that it worked to highlight that gothic split in him of the strange and troubled private side and the solid and responsible public side. The hidden vs. the seen. And it also works as that ceaseless voice in the head of a mad person, the voice that won’t leave him alone.

Did you find this narrative technique to be successful or off-putting?  Did it take a while for you to settle into the book because of O’Nan’s style here?
—–  
5)  Mark Winegardner, writing for Barnes and Noble, says:

When I finished Stewart O’Nan’s A Prayer for the Dying . . . I called him. I told him how jealous I was that he’d been able to write such a large-vision book in such a svelte (190-page) package. Flannery O’Connor was right: A good man is hard to find, when what’s meant by “good” is moral and not civil, when it refers to something larger than likability. What O’Nan does in this book — create a convincingly good man and put him in the middle of his story — is among the toughest acts a novelist can perform.

Given some of his actions in the story, Is Jacob Hanson a good man?  Is he a moral man?  Does Hanson believe, as one reviewer has stated, ”that the calamity is all his fault.”  Is it even possible to be a good man in a time of madness.
—–
6) In the first chapter we find this bit of dialogue: 

“In Heaven you forget everything,” she says. “In Hell they make you remember.”
No, you think, it’s the other way around. “Maybe so,” you say.

Which do you think it is, if either? 
—–  
7) O’Nan says that the one question underlying all of his work is “When do you give up?” Which, he concedes, “is a horrible question to ask, but it’s a question that a lot of people have to face.” Then, echoing Hamlet’s famous soliloquy on the subject, he adds, “That’s the question.” 
Do you see this question reflected in A Prayer for the Dying?  Is this question “the question?” 
O’Nan also once stated, ”I am primarily a realist and hope to show great empathy for my people without softening the difficult situations they find themselves in-yet my work inevitably veers into the cruel and the sentimental…It is extreme fiction masquerading behind the guise of mainstream realism. I hope it is generous, or, as Cheever said, ‘humane.’” 
Is A Prayer for the Dying a humane book despite its extremes? 
—–  
8) On the last page of the novel Jacob thinks:

“The whole idea of penance is selfish, misguided. You can’t bargain with God, buy Him with pieties. This is what you’ve found out – that even with the best intentions, even with all of your thoughtful sermons and deep feelings and good works, you can’t save anyone, least of all yourself. And yet it’s not defeat. After everything, you may still be saved. Your mother was wrong; it’s not up to you. It’s always been His decision.”

Ultimately, what does this book say about Divine providence?  Do you agree with Hanson’s statements?

Prayer for the Dying Excerpt from Salon

THURSDAY, DEC 16, 1999 12:00 PM EST

A Prayer for the Dying

STEWART O'NAN

It’s darker under the trees, the stars peeking through the canopy, a hint of hyacinth in the air. Tomorrow’s Saturday, and you haven’t even begun your sermon. How many ways are there to say have faith? You search your memory for a parable on strength, on trusting the Lord. Abraham and Isaac come to mind, but you just did that last week. Job’s overused. Lot. You shake your head and walk on. It’ll come, just give it time. Maybe leaf through Matthew after supper, look over your old notes.

Round the bend, and there’s your house, the lamp lit, windows warm and orange as your neighbors’. Is it selfish that you give thanks for this, that the sight touches you more deeply — that it seems to mean more — after poor Lydia Flynn? If so, you don’t mean to be cruel. And you’ve done right by her, you make sure of that.

Through the gate and up the walk toward the front door. It’ll be good to get his gun belt off, the jacket, the boots. You’ve earned your supper.

Locked, just as you instructed. You jangle the big key ring, searching.

Open the door and the light blinds you. Fresh bread, and the salty crackle of fat. On the floor of the sitting room lies Amelia’s stuffed duck, toppled on its side. You undo the gun belt — Marta won’t have it around the child — and stow it high in the front closet, thumping the door shut to announce yourself. When no one comes, you make your way to the kitchen.

It’s empty, a wisp of steam floating up through a hole in the stove top.

“Marta,” you call.

In the dining room the table’s set, your milk poured, the high chair between the two seats so you can each minister to her. The tray holds a spray of crumbs, a slug of gravy. Maybe they couldn’t wait.

The back of the house is dark.

“Marta?”

You try your room first, peering in the door. She’s not on the bed, and immediately you turn to the nursery.

It’s black, and you have to leave the hallway before you see Marta sitting in the rocking chair, her hair a bright frame, her face dark, impossible to read. She’s still, hands in her lap. Amelia’s in her crib, already asleep, and softly you go to Marta.

“I’m sorry,” you apologize, ready to explain why, but she doesn’t take your hands, she doesn’t look at you, as if you’ve done something inexcusable. A wet sniff and you know she’s been crying.

“What is it?”

“She’s sick,” she says.

“What do you mean?” you ask, though you already know. Better than anyone, you know.

“She’s sick,” Marta says, and now she’s clutching at you, grabbing, crushing herself to you with a strength you find frightening. “Jacob, she’s sick.”

Allusions in a Prayer for the Dying

Allusions in A Prayer for the Dying

EQ: How does A Prayer for the Dying relate to Job in the bible?
Work on 2nd person short stories
Last day for Scholastic entries

HMWK: Read to pg. 94 Ch. 5 for Friday

Job (/ˈdʒoʊb/; Hebrew: אִיּוֹב, Modern Iyyov, Tiberian ʾIyyôḇ) is the central character of the Book of Job in the Bible. Job (Arabic: أيّوب, Ayyūb‎) is considered a prophet in the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Inrabbinical literature, Iyov (אִיּוֹב) is called one of the prophets of the Gentiles.^[1]

Job is presented as a good and prosperous family man who is beset with horrendous disasters that take away all that he holds dear, including his offspring, his health, and his property. He struggles to understand his situation and begins a search for the answers to his difficulties. God rewards Job's obedience during his travails by restoring his health, doubling his original wealth and giving him seven new sons and three new daughters, which bore his great grandchildren before he died, 140 years later.^[2]

Diphtheria (from Greek: διφθέρα diphthera, meaning leather) is an infection caused by the bacterium Corynebacterium diphtheriae.^[1] Signs and symptoms may vary from mild to severe.^[2] They usually start two to five days after exposure.^[1] Symptoms often come on fairly gradually beginning with a sore throat and fever.^[2] In severe cases a grey or white patch develops in the throat.^[1][2] This can block the airway and create a barking cough as in croup.^[2] The neck may swell in part due to large lymph nodes.^[1] A form of diphtheria that involves the skin, eyes, or genitals also exists.^[1][2] Complications may include myocarditis, inflammation of nerves,kidney problems, and bleeding problems due to low blood platelets. Myocarditis may result in an abnormal heart rate and inflammation of the nerves may result in paralysis.^[1]

Diphtheria is usually spread between people by direct contact or through the air.^[1][3] It may also be spread by contaminated objects. Some people carry the bacteria without having symptoms, but can still spread the disease to others. There are three main types of C. diphtheriae causing different severities of disease.^[1] The symptoms are due to a toxin produced by the bacteria. Diagnosis can often be made based on the appearance of the throat with confirmation by culture. Previous infection may not prevent against future infection.^[2]

A vaccine, known as diphtheria toxoid, is effective for prevention and available in a number of formulations. Three or four doses, given along with tetanus toxoid and acellular pertussis vaccine, are recommended during childhood. Further doses are recommended every ten years. Protection can be verified by measuring the antitoxin level in the blood. Treatment is with the antibiotic erythromycin or penicillin G. These antibiotics may also be used for prevention in those who have been exposed to the infection.^[1] A surgical procedure known as a tracheostomy is sometimes needed to open the airway in severe cases.^[2]

In 2013, 4,700 cases were officially reported, down from nearly 100,000 in 1980.^[4] It is believed, however, that about a million cases occurred per year before the 1980s.^[2] It currently occurs most often in Sub-Saharan Africa, India, and Indonesia.^[2][5] In 2013, it resulted in 3,300 deaths down from 8,000 deaths in 1990.^[6] In areas where it is still common, children are most affected. It is rare in the developed world due to widespreadvaccination.^[2] In the United States 57 cases were reported between 1980 and 2004. Death occurs in between 5% and 10% of those affected. The disease was first described in the 5th century BCE by Hippocrates. The bacteria was discovered in 1882 by Edwin Klebs.^[1]

Wisconsin Death Trip

Film adaptation[edit]

Main article: Wisconsin Death Trip (film)

The 1999 film adaptation was directed by James Marsh as a docudrama. It was shot primarily in black-and-white, with contrasting color sequences of modern life in the area. It combined re-enactments of some of the events described in the book with a voice-over narration by Ian Holm. Its visual style was intended to carry the content of the film; as Marsh said:

I wanted to convey in the film the real pathos contained in a four line newspaper report that simultaneously records and dismisses the end of someone’s life.^[1]

Link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMhr6JY352g 

In popular culture[edit]

Music
The book inspired a number of musical works, including the opera Black River by Conrad Susa, which was composed in 1975 and revised 1981; the "dramatic cantata" Songs of Madness and Sorrow by Daron Hagen; and the 1999 album Wisconsin Death Trip by the band Static-X. British post-punk band Echo & the Bunnymen used photographs from the book as artwork for their 2001 album Flowers, as well as its singles. A song performed by Jerry Joseph also shares a name with the book, but it is not clear whether the song was also inspired by the book. Most recently, the book was adapted into a bluegrass/roots-rock opera by Tim Raphael and composer Jeff Berkson, which had its world premiere at Georgetown University's Davis Performing Arts Center on February 1, 2008. The soundtrack for the film adaptation of the book features original music by DJ Shadow and John Cale.

Literature
The Australian author Rod Jones cites Wisconsin Death Trip as an inspiration for his novel Billy Sunday, and the American author Robert Goolrick also cites it as an inspiration for his novel A Reliable Wife. Stephen King's book of novellas, Full Dark, No Stars, citesWisconsin Death Trip as the inspiration for the story 1922.

Film
In commentary on the two-disc DVD release of the Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There, director Todd Haynes said that much of the imagery for the town of Riddle in the Richard Gere segment of the film was inspired by Lesy's book. Director Walter Murch also used the book as an historical source for the 1985 cult classic Return to Oz.^[2]

Television
The creators of the show The Heart, She Holler have discussed being influenced by the book in the creation of their show about rural Ameri

A Prayer for the Dying

AGENDA:

Think, Pair, Share and post comments:

4. What role does religious faith play in the story? How does it influence Jacob, Chase, and other citizens of Friendship? Is their faith rewarded?
5. Jacob is a veteran of the Civil War. How does his experience there affect the way he behaves in the crisis in Friendship? How did the war change him?
6. How would you describe the relationship between Jacob and Doc? How do their different ideas about the world lead to different strategies for handling the outbreak in Friendship?
7. How does Jacob’s relationship with Marta affect his behavior in the outbreak? How do his priorities as a father and husband conflict with his responsibility to the town?

Read excerpt on Salon page:
http://www.salon.com/1999/12/16/onan_2/

What makes this excerpt haunting and memorable?  Look up the Biblical allusions. 
What writing techniques does O'Nan use to create the tragic "horror"  of this scene?

Continue working on Scholastic entries and second person short stories. 

READING HMWK: Finish book for Friday

Prayer for the Dying Review

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 . . .

"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:

Jerry Bauer/ Henry Holt and Company

Stewart O'NanAlso Today in Books A. S. ByattAudio Featured Author:Peter Matthiessen Books Forums

"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.