The Resurrectionists: A Novel [Hardcover]

Michael Collins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 24, 2002

The Booker and IMPAC Prize-nominated author of "The Keepers of Truth" delivers a haunting novel of psychological suspense about a wayward family's search for salvation in an America that has left them behind.

The solitude of the Upper Michigan Peninsula is Michael Collins's heart of darkness in this compelling story of the unquiet dead. Almost thirty years ago, when Frank Cassidy was five, his parents burned to death in a remote Michigan town. Now Frank's uncle is dead too, shot by a mysterious stranger who lies in a coma in the local hospital. Frank, working menial jobs to support his unfaithful wife and two children, takes his family north in a series of stolen cars to dispute his cousin's claim on the family farm. Once there, however, Frank also wants answers to questions about his own past: Who really set the fire that burned the family home and killed his parents? Will the stranger, who hangs between life and death, be able to shed light on long-buried secrets?

As the television blares the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, news of Jim Jones, and endless sitcom reruns, simple answers -- and the promise of the American dream -- seem to recede from Frank's grasp. Brilliant and unsettling, "The Resurrectionists" is an ironic yet chilling indictment of American culture in the seventies and a compassionate novel about a man struggling to overcome the crimes and burdens of his past.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Resurrectionists, Irish writer Michael Collins's follow-up to his Booker Prize-nominated The Keepers of Truth, is a thriller that bubbles up from the tawdry stew of its central character's fringe existence. Frank Cassidy is a clinically depressed, all-but-impoverished New Jersey man who receives word that his uncle Ward (who raised Frank after his parents were killed) has died. Frank's reaction is telling: perhaps there's a piece of Ward's Michigan farm that has been willed to him. Traveling in a succession of stolen cars, Frank gets to his snowbound destination and finds that Ward's death is shrouded in mystery; worse, Frank is implicated in the crime.

Collins has written a significantly ambitious work here that wants to be more literary than its genre conventions typically require. This makes for a novel with many memorable elements but a blurry reading experience overall. Still, one has to appreciate the author's insight. Strategically set in 1979, the story's emotional landscape is profoundly provocative and disturbing, a photo album of sociocultural exhaustion. The characters are burdened by sundry fallout effects of Vietnam, Watergate, recession, and mutable family structures. Cumulative dread and regression fill the air. In such a setting, a fellow like Frank, somewhere between ordinary life and the netherworld of crime, between failure and redemption, is a consummate protagonist. --Tom Keogh --This text refers to the Unknown Binding edition.

From Publishers Weekly

I couldnt quite get us back without incident for the burial of my father. We ran into a little trouble along the way. It took us two stolen cars along the interstate to get us home. Collins, an Irish-American writer whose last novel, The Keepers of Truth, was shortlisted for the Booker, has perfected the art of beginning a novel, as the sentences above attest. The year is 1979, and narrator Frank Cassidy is stuck in a dead end job in New Jersey. Orphaned at the age of five when his parents were burnt to death in a fire, Frank is still haunted by his past and fights off fits of clinical depression. He's married to Honey and has two kids, 14-year-old Robert Lee and five-year-old Ernie. Robert Lee is actually the son of Honeys first husband, a murderer now on death row. When Frank discovers by chance that his adoptive father, Ward Cassidy, was shot and killed on his farm in Cooper, Mich., he packs up the family and returns to his hometown, in spite of his stepbrother Normans advice not to come. With little to return to in New Jersey, the family decides to stay in Cooper for a while. Frank gets a job in security at a local college and in his spare time investigates the link between the mystery of Wards murder and the mysteries surrounding his own early life. The connection seems to hinge on the identity of Wards murderer. Is he really Chester Green, the presumably long dead son of a local farmer? (And why would Chester kill Ward?) Contrary to Scott Fitzgeralds oft-repeated dictum that there are no second acts in American life, Collins shows that second acts are what America is all about: for all the battered existences on display in this novel, there's a faith, a persistent optimism, that lifts them above the tawdriness of their details.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; 1St Edition edition (September 24, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743229045
• ISBN-13: 978-0743229043
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,832,725 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Yes There Is Life After New Jersey, December 15, 2002

By 

Louis N. Gruber "Author of Jay" (Lexington, SC United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Resurrectionists: A Novel (Hardcover)

Frank Cassidy is a likeable, well-read lowlife with the most dysfunctional family since Cain and Abel. His marriage is disintegrating, his job is going nowhere, his stepson hates him, and his wife's previous husband, awaiting execution in Georgia, hovers around the family like a malignant phantom. Into this dismal picture comes news that Frank's father (actually stepfather, actually his uncle, Ward), has been killed. Frank has fantasies of going back and claiming his share of the family farm; maybe even unraveling his tortured past, sorting out what really happened when his parents were mysteriously killed in a fire many years before.

Of course there are many complications between low life in New Jersey and new life in the upper peninsula of Michigan. For one, he isn't welcome; for another he has to steal two cars and $4000 to finance the trip. Strangely enough, you continue to like Frank, and you hope things will work out for him. And in strange, unexpected ways, they do.

Along the way he tries to reconstruct his past, hidden behind layers of family secrets, and the destructive probing of an incompetent therapist many years before. And the surprise ending is really out of the ordinary.

Michael Collins is an excellent writer, but the book does have some flaws. The dialogue is sometimes had to believe, too literary for the characters who are speaking it. The portrayal of psychiatric illness and treatment is so far from reality, even for the time portrayed, that it is a little embarrassing to the modern reader. The author should have done a bit more homework in this area.

All in all, though, the book works, it is entertaining, it keeps you involved, and--yes--the characters do find new life. I recommend this book. Louis N. Gruber

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars chilling and poignant eulogy to our past, October 22, 2002

By 

john B. saul (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Resurrectionists: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mysteries wrapped into snow, January 21, 2003

By 

lvkleydorff - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Resurrectionists: A Novel (Hardcover)

This book seems to start out on the wrong foot. It is narrated by Frank Cassidy, somebody with only a rudimentary education on the lower rungs of life. You wonder where he gets all that penny-ante philosophy and the flight of lyrics from: "We were all nobodies at our essence". Or "The silver scratches of falling rain". That kind of writing can be irritating.

But, later, we meet up with the characters of the book, such as as the wife Honey and the children Robert Lee and `Ernie, Franks uncle Ward Cassidy, the neighbors Sam and Chester Green, the psychiatrist Dr. Brown, Ward's son Norman and his wife Martha. They all are what you would call "damaged goods". The mystery at the center of the story is: Who killed Frank's parents who dies in the arson of their home. And what goes on with "The Sleeper", who lies in a waking coma at the local hospital. And who killed Ward Cassidy?

The story is told with great skill, lifting the vail of a snowy landscape only a little at a time, keeping you guessing. You get a feeling of floating along with it, never able to penetrate the various mysteries. In that respect, it is a great novel.

The solution to it all comes on the last few pages. It makes convoluted sense, but is far from satisfying. The novel might have more impact if it had been told straight forward, without Frank's ruminations.