19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A profound and readable novel with nuanced characters and witty, honest prose, October 20, 2005
This review is from: Maybe a Miracle: A Novel (Hardcover)
It is rare these days to be propelled through a novel by the sheer force of wanting to know what will happen next. A young writer who can, through both style and subject, achieve that kind of urgency is a rare find indeed. With his debut novel MAYBE A MIRACLE, Brian Strause proves to be just such a stroke of literary luck. He has developed a plot that is compulsively readable, while also achieving nuanced character development, wit and honesty in his prose.
Strause is a refreshing new voice in the female-dominated world of nuanced and quirky family dramas; tales that are deceptively small-scale --- depicting one family's very unique story --- but nevertheless have resounding impact. Nestled between the lines of this deceptively sweet, fable-esque story, fundamental issues of faith, family, life, death, voyeurism and the media play themselves out. Unlike many a modern novelist, Strause never makes the self-aggrandizing declaration that he will tackle these "big ideas" --- he is never politically preachy or socially smug.
Crucial to this novel's disarming nature --- and one of the key ways to Strause's tackling of grander themes without coming off as pompous or pretentious --- is its narrator, Monroe Anderson. Monroe is an exceptional voice, wry and cynical --- a perfectly believable teenage boy --- but with an innate sweetness that shines through despite his own best intentions. Monroe himself would loathe to be labeled as sweet, to be called optimistic or engaging, and yet readers will find themselves fully devoted to him, allowing him to paint the story as it unfolds. The story starts on the night of his senior prom as Monroe goes into his backyard to smoke a joint before he meets his girlfriend and finds his younger sister floating facedown in the pool. Readers are thrust with Monroe into the spiral of events that unfold around him.
It is to Strause's credit that Monroe is such a nuanced and subtle character, one that feels so deeply realized and honest. One can't help but imagine that Strause culled much of Monroe from his own experience as a teenage boy. There is a palpable sense of the writer's duty to paint a ruefully honest portrait of a teenage boy who is both sweetly flawed yet deeply compassionate. In the wake of all the aspiring Holden Caulfields, contemptuous of the flawed adults around them and sneering their way through bumpy adolescence, Monroe is a revelatory creation.
The other members of Monroe's family are similarly well-drawn, each reacting to Annika's accident and the events that follow in unique and believable, yet unexpected, fashions. The rose petals that fall from the sky outside Annika's hospital room and her tendency to spontaneously bleed from her hands only complicate matters, as the masses flock to see this "Miracle," and each of them --- Monroe, his mother, his father, his grandfather and his older brother --- must somehow contend with the very bizarre nature of this young girl's celebrity. Monroe's mother descends into a kind of faith-based delusion, imagining Annika is a conduit for the pain and suffering of the masses and encouraging both the media attention and the pilgrimage of the sick to her bedside. Monroe's father withdraws both emotionally and physically from the family, burying himself in work and dulling the reality of his situation with alcohol. The descent of both of these characters is gradual, convincing and, as rendered through Monroe's clear-eyed gaze, heartbreaking.
Weeks after finishing the novel, long after they have turned the last page, readers will find themselves drifting back to the story of Monroe and Annika, mulling over the outcome --- the fate of the characters --- pondering the weight of the last scene, and perhaps flipping back to take in that last line. It is in the staying power of the characters, the stickiness of the morality at work here, and the weight of the themes that play themselves out, that the novel reveals its importance. Finally, MAYBE A MIRACLE is doubly satisfying, both as a compulsively readable, deeply felt work of literature and as the harbinger of an important and vital new voice in contemporary literature.
--- Reviewed by Jennifer Krieger
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Everything is a piece of the puzzle, a puzzle of clouds", October 16, 2005
This review is from: Maybe a Miracle: A Novel (Hardcover)
The often-uneasy combination of science and faith is at the center of Maybe A Miracle, Brian Strause's wise, witty, and sardonic debut novel about coming of age in America's heartland. Told from the perspective of the eighteen-year-old Monroe Anderson, Maybe A Miracle is all about how Monroe's family, an average American family is transformed by a terrible tragedy, and then by a series of unexplained events.
Monroe is a young, world-weary cynic, who has spent much his life trying to stay out of trouble. Totally wise before his age, he lives in a comfortably affluent suburb of Columbus Ohio, a thoughtful outsider, Monroe has a penchant for sarcasm and oftentimes looks quite mockingly at the mediocrity of the middleclass.
Monroe just can't stand his older brother Ben, a rising golf star, who has sadistically picked on him since he was a boy. He hardly knows his father, a workaholic high powered corporate lawyer, and his mother seems to be preoccupied with the demands of domestic life. It is only through Annika, his eleven-year-old sister that Monroe really feels as though he can be himself.
One afternoon as Monroe is getting ready for his school prom, he decides to escape to the pool house to smoke a joint before the big party. But nothing prepares him for the shock of finding his dearly beloved sister floating facedown in the family pool. Of course, he does what anyone would do and dives in and rescues her, but not quickly enough to prevent her from slipping into a coma.
While Annika's condition is diagnosed as in a "persistent vegetative state," his mother, actually believes that "she's locked in, which basically means she's in there but she can't get out," decides to look after her home. But this is a family where no one ever tells anyone anything, and they all cope with the tragedy in different ways, Monroe's mother turns to religion, his father turns to liquor, and Monroe himself must decide what's worth believing in.
Soon after Annika arrives back, strange things begin to happen. Annika begins to show stigmata - little pools of blood form on her hands and she starts bleeding from the wrists. The front room in which she lays starts to smell strangely of roses. Annika's stigmata, is nearly always accompanied by seemingly miraculous effects on others and every indication of extreme pain for herself.
Virtually every occurrence surrounding her - from an inexplicable rose-petal shower outside the hospital to the stigmata - is labeled astonishing by various characters, even though Monroe attempts to offer a scientific explanation for the events. According to Father Ferger, who councils the family, the opinion of the Catholic Church is that that an "anointed few are here to aid in the redemption and salvation of the world, to serve as a living reminder of the suffering Jesus endured for us all."
But Monroe, for his part spurns, the Church. He sees people as bartering with God all the time, making promises they'll never keep. "They might as well be asking for salvation on layaway." As word of Annika's powers spread, the family begins to attract various people, whom Monroe's mother calls "pilgrims," but his dad, in the throws of alcoholism, calls "losers." They're all so convinced that if only they could see Annika, she will be able to "heal" them and their problems would go away.
Monroe manages to maintain his faith, amongst the relentless media attention, the hundreds of pilgrims who try to visit daily, and a family that is gradually fracturing and falling apart. He hopes that someday Annika will wake up and they'll "ride out into the country for apple fritters and the wind will blow through her hair and it will be like none of this ever happened."
Author, Brian Strause, cleverly skewers the world of religion, raising some interesting questions about the nature of belief and faith. In Monroe's world, everything that happens, happens for a reason and where everything is a piece of the puzzle, a puzzle of clouds, "that we'll only be able to decipher when we're dead, but until then, have some faith."
Strause's characters are energetic, their personalities well defined, even eccentric in their innocent and blameless mediocrity. The writing crackles with energy, humor, and an appreciation of the often-uneasy relationship between the devotion to faith and the devotion to science. The author's prose is extraordinarily intimate, as Monroe, our intrepid, and trusty narrator, whispers sardonic secrets about his family and the world around him that only we can hear.
Maybe a Miracle is just aching to be optioned for a movie; it's a bouncy and lively tale that captures the imagination, lining up believers on each side of the philosophical divide, those who yearn for miracles and those who just don't believe in them. But it's also a novel that is about the spirit of the teenage underdog, who has more smarts, intellect, and adult charisma than he knows what to do with. Mike Leonard October 05.
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