The Keepers of Truth

Michael Collins

The setting is America's mid-West in either the late 1970s or early 1980s. Certainly it is some time after Vietnam and after American manufacturing lost its way. Our protagonist is Bill, lowly and lonely journalist with local newspaper, "The Truth". Smart enough to realise that his town has been destroyed by factory closures but not strong enough to leave he spends his time writing imaginary rants about America's loss of confidence as well as writing cute imaginary headlines for future disasters. "PAPER FOLDS" is his choice for when his own employment disappears.

In the real world he is covering cookie bake-offs and school sports until a missing person story is uncovered on farmland in the town's suburbs. The missing person is old Pa Lawton and the prime suspect is his lowlife son, Ronny. Bill is dispatched by the paper to cover the story and is quickly drawn into a complex relationship with Ronny Lawton. A police search of the Lawton property turns up an infant buried under the cellar and a finger on the stairs. So far, so Twin Peaks.

But the story, instead of being about the search both for the father's body and the evidence to nail the son, turns out instead to be about America at its lowest ebb. Ronny Lawton is the emblem of a damaged country, a belligerent and limited man with a job as short order chef in a local fast-food joint. Collins does a clever thing near the end of the novel with Ronny's employee-of-the-month award pathetically juxtaposed with Ronny's dead brother's framed commendation for service in Vietnam. His estranged wife lives in a trailer out of town with their brutalised son (paternity doubts aside). Bill dubs the son the "Fast Food Kid" when he learns that the boy has never eaten a home-cooked meal in his life.

Sorry, but I didn't like it at all. I can see why it got so much praise and I can see that Collins is a clever writer but everything about it screamed "too much" for me. Surely you can write a story about damaged people without suicides finishing off two of the major characters. "Hey, but that's just HOW damaged they are", Collins seems to be saying. I felt like I'd been hit over the head. And when Bill gets back to his mansion (oh yeah, he's rich as well as miserable, naturally) for a lonely night of worrying about whether Ronny Lawton is guilty (and how come America is finished) all he hears are the cries and howls of animals. Because, of course, he lives next to the zoo.

Too much, too much. Too portentous, too ponderous. Collins is Irish of course, not American, but I couldn't see how to work that into the review. I'm sure it makes it a more impressive piece of work in that the novel's voice is a very American voice. If you like the book, I mean. I didn't.