Salon Books | A Prayer for the Dying


	F E A T U R E Spurious George: A geek tragedy By Jake Tapper In yet another tell-all book about President Clinton, former aide Stephanopoulos offers a tour de force of betrayal, self-loathing and self-promotion T A B L E+T A L K Online games for bookworms. Play one-word association with book titles in Table Talk's Books Section R E C E N T L Y Our Dumb Century: 100 Years of Headlines from America's Finest News Source By Scott Dikkers and the Staff of the Onion Fiction (04/01/99) An Elegant Madness: High Society in Regency England By Venetia Murray Nonfiction (03/31/99) Prince Of Pleasure: The Prince of Wales and the Making of the Regency By Saul David Nonfiction (03/31/99) The Sabbathday River By Jean Hanff Korelitz Fiction (03/30/99) Betty Friedan: Her Life By Judith Hennessee Nonfiction (03/29/99) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SEARCH REVIEWS BY: title of book author publisher reviewer - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BLACK VOICES An archive of stories on African-American themes - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -		-. A-.P R A Y E R-.F O R-.T H E-.D Y I N G BY STEWART O'NAN HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY FICTION 195 PAGES BY ANDREW ROE \| You have to wonder if Stewart O'Nan had the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns in mind when he decided to set his harrowing and masterful new novel, "A Prayer for the Dying," in Friendship, Wis., a sleepy post-Civil War hamlet that undergoes a reckoning of Old Testament proportions. It's a safe bet that bad things are bound to happen in a town called Friendship -- very bad things. And O'Nan holds nothing back. The disasters mount, and after the climactic fury of the closing pages the reader is left breathless and overwhelmed at just how much misery one author can dream up. To his credit, however, O'Nan not only crafts a mesmerizing tale of Gothic terror and tragedy; he also anchors the novel with a resilient humanity and an urgent, eerie beauty. Like Camus' "The Plague," "A Prayer for the Dying" is part horror story, part biblical fable, part meditation on the human capacity to endure. But where Camus opted for a good old-fashioned pestilence, bubonic plague, O'Nan employs a more mundane diphtheria outbreak as the catalyst for Friendship's chilling descent. As the number of cases escalates and the body count rises, a belated quarantine is imposed. And as if that weren't enough, a raging wildfire forces an evacuation; ultimately the flames engulf Friendship and the surrounding countryside, "the sky violent and backlit, shimmering like some artist's version of hell." Just how much can one town take -- or rather, how much seemingly random suffering can we withstand yet still be able to make a Kierkegaardian leap of faith and accede to the authority of a higher power? That's the spiritual dilemma O'Nan puts to the reader and to his Job-like protagonist, Jacob Hansen, a Civil War veteran who serves as Friendship's sheriff, minister and undertaker. Although Jacob stoically continues his professional duties (caring for the dead, enforcing the quarantine), at home he succumbs to the madness breeding around him: He goes a little Stephen King and takes to dressing up and speaking to the rotting corpses of his baby daughter and his wife. Here, as in the rest of the novel, O'Nan describes the horror with a skillful balance of menace and restraint, countering the gruesomeness of his subject with the rapture of his language and the conviction with which he inhabits Jacob's consciousness. (Imagine a less wordy Faulkner or Cormac McCarthy.) The author of four previous novels, including "The Speed Queen" and "The Names of the Dead," and one of the writers on Granta's 1996 list of the best young American novelists, O'Nan here solidifies his reputation as a writer of versatility and depth. Apart from a few minor errant steps -- the questionable use of the second person, an underdeveloped subplot involving a religious colony -- "A Prayer for the Dying" shudders hauntingly toward its unsettling and inevitable (and satisfying) end. "Lately it seems there are mysteries everywhere," Jacob muses, "as if you've only just opened your eyes." And it's the mystery of faith, O'Nan suggests, that is the greatest mystery of all. SALON \| April 2, 1999 Andrew Roe has written for the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review and other publications.