Angels among us.

Secrets of Eden
Chris Bohjalian

When people ask me if I like Chris Bohjalian, I reply, without even thinking, that's I love him, and that he's one of my favorite authors. But while reading his latest, Secrets of Eden, I had to stop and ask myself: Is that really true?

Let's explore, shall we? I've read Midwives about six times, to date. It will always be a five-star read for me. Before You Know Kindness is also one of my perennial favorites--I should read that again, actually. I think it's time. Trans-Sister Radio was fine for me up until the end, when it was bizarre. The Buffalo Soldier was a definite phone-in by C.Bo, and The Law of Similars pretty much left me cold. I couldn't finish The Double Bind or Water Witches. And I was downright pissed off at Skeletons at the Feast, so much so that I couldn't even review it. It had empty spaces, when it should have been rich all the way through. I felt, when I read it, that all the elements of a good story were there, but that Bohjalian didn't want to put forth the effort to really make it work. And there is nothing I hate worse than a good storyline, wasted.

So, basically: I liked two of Bohjalian's books, and I have not liked six. And yet he is one of my favorites? Hmm.

I'm not sure where Secrets of Eden falls on the spectrum. I finished it, and I didn't hate it, so it is definitely above Water Witches, Double Bind, and Skeletons. The plot is mostly promising enough: Less than 24 hours after the Rev. Stephen Drew baptizes Alice Hayward she is murdered by her husband, who then kills himself. Stephen feels guilty because he knew George Hayward was abusing Alice, but did nothing. And also, because he was totally having sex with Alice. He has a crisis of faith and leaves town, and the D.A. who is handling the Hayward case gets suspicious. There's no doubt that George killed Alice--but did Stephen Drew kill George?

Scandale! I love a good scandal. And I love courtroom dramas because I get to find reversible errors in the author's (inevitable) gaps in legal knowledge and that helps me to feel that my $100,000 law degree has not been totally in vain. So 3/4 of this plot is just fine by me, if a little empty, in some places.

But the other 1/4...it can basically be summed up in three letters: "WTF?" Because a lot of the word count in this novel is devoted to exploring the topic of angels among us. Not only people who are so kind they are angelic, but actual furry-winged little elves who fly around and pluck falling aircraft from the sky. As in, one of the other characters in this book is a famous writer who has written a book called Angels and Aurascapes, because she believes in actual angels and also that people and the planet have auras that can be felt and seen.

My sense is that angels come to us: We don't come to them. We don't solicit them, we don't ask for them--though, certainly, we may address prayers in their direction. But we don't knock, because after all we would be knocking on air--on aura.

[...]

She was a psychiatrist whose first name was Corona. Corona Noel. Is there a more perfect name for an angel?....this young woman, wise beyond her years, may not have met her own angel yet (though it did indeed seem possible to me that this Corona Noel had celestial connections).

It's really hard for me to go there. I'm a skeptic. I don't believe in angels. I just don't. If pressed, and a little tipsy, I might admit to some metaphysical presence in the world as yet unexplained by physics, but I definitely, definitely can't follow to the realm of little winged protectors. And I am surprised anybody who writes serious literary fiction would go there himself, or expect me to go there without a little intellectual back-and-forth on the topic. I mean, Marian Keyes writes chicklit and has a book called Angels, but was familiar enough with her intended audience and like, the bounds of credulity, to know she needed to stay relatively figurative about it all.

Seems to me like the publisher missed a brilliant cross-branding approach.

And I think that's my problem, the fact that I was thinking of Bohjalian's works as actual literary fiction. I read Midwives in high school, and to me, then, it was The Height of Literary Fiction, a really important book, that said a lot about LIFE and HOW TO LIVE IT. And he got the Oprah treatment, so it was hard not to take him seriously. But C.Bo isn't the next Thomas Pynchon. He never has been. He writes commercial fiction. Airport fiction, you know? He's the male equivalent of Jodi Picoult. I love Jodi Picoult but I don't expect her works to expound in an especially intelligent way on thorny existential topics. I expect them to be engaging, juicy, dramatic, reasonably smart, and more than a little sentimental. I expect them to have angels. I can swallow those angels because it's not supposed to be serious fiction that I'm reading. I've been judging Bohjalian by the wrong standards. That's not his fault. It's mine.

But even by the commercial fiction barometer--the Picoult-o-meter--Secrets fails. There's not really enough story to sustain its length and its all very cold and clinical when it shouldn't be. If you are going to have a story about angels comforting poor little orphans and things like that, then I better get to see an angel comforting a poor orphan. It was like Bohjalian was holding back, afraid to go there. Don't hold back, Bohjalian! Go Full Orphan. Why not? We already know this isn't serious literary fiction.

Jodi Picoult would have gone there and kept going, and you know it. She would have had a beautiful angel with iridescent rainbow wings swoop down and sing a lullaby to a dying child, while holding it against her beautiful angel breast. And I'd still be weeping over that shit as I typed this review. But as it is? Not a tear, here.

Rating: 2.5 of 5 stars