Maybe a Miracle: A Novel (Hardcover)

by Brian Strause (Author)
Key Phrases: butter cow, Brian Strause, Father Ferger, Barry Larkin (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Strause juxtaposes the caustic and the poignant in his first novel, a pitch-perfect teenage take on human failings and superhuman spectacle in central Ohio. Monroe Anderson, stealing away to smoke pot before his senior prom, discovers his vivacious, sensitive 11-year-old sister, Annika, face down in their pool. He saves her life, but she remains in a coma. A crowd of well-wishers pray beneath Annika's hospital window, and it's not too long before the miracles begin: rose petals rain from the sky; Annika's hands bleed like stigmata. Soon Annika is inspiring letters, pleas and pilgrimages from the nation's sick and grieving, whom Monroe alternately pities and scorns, as he does the family priest who promotes Annika as a latter-day Jesus. The media fuels the frenzy, and Monroe's mother dolls Annika up for her visitors with feverish optimism. Monroe's workaholic father and loutish older brother also reveal their fragilities in the crucible of Annika's prolonged coma, an estranging rather than unifying force. The metaphysical runs up against the mundane with darkly comic ambiguity. "If Annika had the power to heal, wouldn't she heal herself first... and go into the kitchen and make everyone pancakes?" Monroe thinks. Monroe's barbed detachment and biting sarcasm, tempered by the awe that steals over him at unguarded moments, hold the reader even when the plot crawls.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Monroe Anderson sneaks down to the family pool house to get high on the night of his senior prom and finds his younger sister, Annika, unconscious in the water. He dives in, rescues her and manages to restore her breathing. But Annika remains comatose as the rest of this serio-comical novel unfolds. Miracles seem to materialize around her: the face of Jesus in a rust stain, a rain of rose petals, stigmata on her hands. Monroe's mother begins seeing her daughter as the personal messenger of Jesus Christ; family dynamics strain, unravel and ravel up again, and Monroe struggles to understand what's happening.

Since Monroe Anderson is a disaffected teenage boy, comparisons with Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye -- like the one appearing on the book's back cover -- are as inevitable as they are misplaced. Monroe is nothing like Holden. He's less troubled and less self-righteous. And, more important, he doesn't really sound young and vulnerable. Sure, he alludes to being insecure, but I didn't feel the profound uncertainty of a teenager in search of his identity.

Still, Monroe is clever and quizzical. His observations are often funny, and he's a keen and self-aware observer of contemporary American life. Brian Strause's writing overall is clean and skilled, and the dialogue is believable. But none of the characters other than Monroe really comes to life. Even Annika feels more like a collection of comments and tics than a person. Monroe's older brother, Ben, is a champion golfer and a drunk who delights in thinking up sadistic tricks to torment Monroe. Their father is an obsessive lawyer. Monroe's mother deals with her grief by committing herself to what she sees as Annika's sacred mission: healing the world. As she and the local priest encourage publicity and as hordes of seekers -- many of them desperately ill -- visit Annika's bedside, she becomes more and more conventionally devout. Yet this is the woman who, according to her son, once described a mall as "architectural vomit." We'd like to understand the process by which someone this interesting fell so far into dogma, but the book doesn't explain it.

Monroe himself does not believe in Annika's miracles, and his comments on the church are caustic. Through much of the novel, I wondered if the author himself is a believer. Would there be a weepy conversion scene at some point or a treacly revelation? Luckily, Strause is too intelligent to set sail in those waters. He unfurls his miracles, has Monroe think up rational explanations for them -- some more convincing than others -- and leaves readers to their own conclusions.

But the climax, when it comes, is oddly disappointing. A person in a coma presents compelling literary possibilities: a swirl of life around a silent figure simultaneously absent and present. Monroe, his family, their friends and acquaintances all argue intermittently about what Annika wants, how she feels and whether the attention of her thousands of followers causes her joy or pain. The religious shenanigans taking place around her bed provide some of the most vivid moments of the book. But there's something else we want: to know what happens in the human mind when the body housing it is trapped and stilled. This is what fascinates about Jean-Dominique Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, an account of the writer's thoughts during the fatal illness that immobilized him. This dimension is explored only cursorily in Maybe a Miracle.

Nonetheless, there are pleasing elements here. Monroe's attempts to reconcile himself to the irreconcilable lead him into a relationship with a woman whose little sister was brutally murdered and who somehow managed to maintain her sanity even while her mother fell to pieces. The novel balances the peace Monroe's mother brought to dozens of sick people against the damage her actions may have caused Annika, and it has the grace to leave such ultimate questions unanswered.

Reviewed by Juliet Wittman
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books (October 11, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400064643
• ISBN-13: 978-1400064649
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #983,045 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 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

By	Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

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

11 of 11 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

By	M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An elegant , witty and very moving treatise on faith, November 6, 2005

By	zoopet (california) - See all my reviews

From memorable characters to hilarious dialogue and one delightful plot twist after another, "Maybe a Miracle" should, by all rights, become the must-read novel of the new year. At a time when organized religion has coopted words like "faith" and "spirituality," it's nothing short of empowering when Strause effortlessly steals those words back for the rest of us. If you've forgotten how to believe ... well, read this book. You won't be disappointed :)