The Resurrectionists

by Michael Collins

Book Overview

The solitude of the Upper Michigan Peninsula is Michael Collins?s heart of darkness in this compelling story of the unquiet dead. Frank Cassidy?s parents burned to death almost thirty years ago; now... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743229045
• ISBN13: 9780743229043
• Release Date: September 2002
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

The Big Chill

Forget the pandering niceties of middle-American values, the sanitized prime-time banalities that plague TV, and journey with a modern Steinbeck, who takes us on a solitary journey across America in search of home and a new life. At least Steinbeck's Jode family had the collective solace of fellow Oakies while wandering West. There was a recognizable enemy. Here in late 20th century America, we face the disenfranchisement of a collective spirit. Frank the protagonist of The Resurrectionists, works as a short-order cook, isolated from his past, marooned in New Jersey in a dead-end life and dead-end marriage. He had two kids, one not of his own "begetting," a step-son, and one that is his own flesh and blood.I would go further... There is a whirlwind of suspense, murder, pain and redemption in this novel. It was featured in our reading group, and it was a novel that was reviled and loved in equal measure, but the genuine vision and insights of the narrator and author cannot be denied. Not to everybody's tastes, but then again, taste should not be the discriminating factor in acknowledging the genius of a work.The novel generated, let me be frank, a sense of antagonism between defenders and detractors, something that we?ve not experienced in the six years we?ve been meeting. I think the debate surrounded political ideology and social beliefs. The Resurrectionists pits us against a man who, despite his humanity by the end of the novel, is capable of murder and has an innate sense of survival. He is, as self-described, a scavenger at the edge of our consciousness? Scary stuff in the most real sense ?

chilling and poignant eulogy to our past

There is nothing quite like the disquieting genius of this book, the dream-like skewing of reality and truth, that captures so chillingly, and sometimes disturbingly the free-fall paranoia and despair of its characters, and yet ultimate redemption. Set in the early eigties, but dealing with the mysterious death of the main character's parents in a fire in the early fifties, we are taken on a journey through space and time, first on a road journey from New Jersey to Upper Michigan, then a journey back in time to a sort of 50's esque world of paranoia and secrets. Here we find some strange characters, a murder suspect who has hung himself and exists in a coma at an old Polio and mental institution. It is into this bizarre world of psycho-analysis that the main character must venture to understand a secret 30 years old.Coupled with this Collins adds another dimension, the main character's wife who was previously divorced and has a husband on death row. His death looms throughout the book. The husband wants to his organs donated for medical purposes, however, his wife suspects, he wants to come after her. In strange ways Collins brings us face to face with moral and ethical questions. It is often only upon reflection, you see understand what you read which is a weird and discomforting aspect of this book, but works because of the subject matter. I confess to rereading chapters, and in a way that is what the book is about, reruns, about returning again to history, to a story.Collins has done something few writers are capable of doing, a work where both its content and its style are interwoven in a virtuoso way.The end will blow you away.

"Like everything else in life...stories within stories."

In this absorbing and multi-layered can't-put-it-downer, Collins provides the reader with innumerable vantage points from which to view the lives of Frank Cassidy and his quirky and dysfunctional family, to see life as Frank sees it, and to watch in fascination as each family member grows and changes. Stuck by circumstance and lack of opportunity at the bottom rung of the economic ladder, Frank, "a scavenger at the edge of existence," Honey, and their children leave New Jersey in a series of stolen cars for the Upper Michigan Peninsula, as soon as they discover that Frank's uncle, who raised him, has died on his farm. An inheritance, however small, could change their lives.A mystery lies at the heart of the novel. Frank's parents died in a fire when he was five, and, through hypnosis and, eventually, treatment for a breakdown, he's come to believe that he and his uncle were both involved in these deaths in some way. Returning to "a town nobody returns to unless under tragic circumstances," Frank starts digging into the past and disrupting lives.On the level of plot alone, the novel is full of excitement, enhanced by vibrant characters with whom one feels great empathy as they wrestle against the circumstances that keep them down, bending the rules, if not breaking them, whenever they can. The vividly described, remote farm environment, the mores of the local community, and the treacherous winter weather generate much of the action and interaction. Collins expands the scope of the novel well beyond plot and melodrama, however, by recreating the ambience of the 1970's and using Richard Nixon, Watergate, and Jim Jones as thematic motifs which recur throughout the novel and show parallels with his characters and story. As the title indicates, this is also a novel with religious parallels, so well integrated that many readers may not even notice them, at first. The Prodigal Son, the Book of Job, and the story of Lot's wife are fairly obvious, while the Parable of the Loaves and Fishes (in this case a trick in which one hits a Coke machine at the right moment to get both the Coke and the money back) may be less so. References to good and evil, hope and despair, death and rebirth, and salvation and resurrection occur throughout, as Frank and his family adapt to life in a small town, try to cope with their internal conflicts, and ultimately to come out ahead. A beautifully developed novel of big ideas, The Resurrectionists is engaging and, to me, totally satisfying on every level. Though I enjoyed Collins's Keepers of Truth, I liked this novel even better--it's one of my favorites of the year. Mary Whipple

Staring into the Abyss

In this dark, twisted tale of hidden secrets and America's secret history, Collins tears assunder our idea of genre, of the crime or the literary novel, and creates a fluid masterpiece that ebbs and flows through the emotional crisis of the book's characters who react against the political landscape of the Cold War and Nixon era. At the center of the book is a murder, the murder of man on a remote farm in Michigan. The killer awaits arrest, then hangs himself and goes into a coma. So begins the journey of the main character back home to claim the farm of the murdered man. Of course, it's not that simple, and the mired history and psychos of the main character undermine any notion that this is strictly a murder mystery, and so begins one of the most cleverly conceived socio-political novels I've ever read. The motif of looking for salvation is an example of how rigorously Collins treads his plot and themes throughout the book. He borrows from the Loave and the fish story, Lot's wife etc., secularizing these stories, putting his characters into modern situations, but keeping the essence of the Bibical stories alive. He makes the characters sense of religious loss all the more poignant. The surreal miracle that the narrator, Frank, performs while robbing a man of his life savings, is one of the great moments in the novel. It's such a cinematic moment of revelation that treads the line between what could end up a brutal slaying or a moment of redemption. Creepy stuff...What Collins has done is taken a strain of gritty realism with its focus on violence, loss, struggle, day-to-day survival, giving us an almost documentary footage rawness of real life. These characters at their worst,are despicable, but at their best the shine with such humanity that we can, if not forgive, at least understand the stain of madness and violence that runs throughout most of the book. What is so brilliant and unsettling is how when you put the book down, it's then that its undertone of political and social critique resurrects itself. It's like the aftertaste of a fine wine. That the book can live on these two levels, that its very structure and content always plays with the visible and the invisible, with the surface and the buried, is truly remarkable. This is a book to read twice, once for the mystery, the second time to ruminate on just how many things this book addresses.

A Dark Allegory Shines

Set against the troubled psychos of our Cold War era, The Resurrectionists works as allegory, a tale of a dysfunctional family who embark on a journey across America in search of answers to an old family secret. Beginning as a road novel, the book moved across America, a journey back in time, from the heat of New Jersey to the refrigerator cold of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. This is one of the most ambitious novels you will read this year, or any year.What is at the heart of this "Cold War Story" is the uncovering of Truth, a recurrent theme in Collins' work. The conceit in the book is that our history was kept from us during the paranoia of the Cold War politics, both by our political leaders, Nixon and Co. Everybody in the book is reacting in someway to Nixon's betrayal in the book. Frank, the main character has a adopted son Robert Lee who has a Nixon pez despenser, his father who's on death row killed the people he did in the wake of watching the Watergate hearings. Also, at work is the fact that uncovering history, or finding the Truth is almost impossible. Things become jumbled, we have to rely on people to tell us what happened, therefore, history is open to interpretation. All this may sound too intellectual, but garbed in the story and characters Collins presents, the allegory works brilliantly. Throughout the book, the use of reruns is masterfully manipulated, so that themes, and moments have a deja vu feel. The main character, having been a victim of Shock Treatment and hypnosis for an event he witnessed as a child, is unreliable, and his sense of history is skewed. For much of the book, we wonder if we are getting the real "Truth."With so many divergent themes that do come together, it's hard encapsulating this book. There's the Sleeper, the comatose figure who murdered a man who lies dormant. What secrets does he hold? There's the main character working through his own memories of the past, there's the wife with the ex-husband, a guy on death row who wants to be executed, who is giving his organs up to his hosts. His wife fears he will come after her in the body of one of these hosts. Mixing the surreal, the gothic, the crime genre, the literary novel, Collins gives us a virtuoso performance, an outside looking in at us. This is by all accounts a near literary masterpiece of emotional and psychological fallout, a starkly told and often brutal and political novel, but for all its apparent bleakness, it is a novel of hope. It shows in quite an extraordinary way toward the end, how we Americans survive. How Collins pulls off this twist, how he gets himself out of the mire of despair is again testimony to his insight into the American Condition.