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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

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.

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.

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 weve not experienced in the six years weve 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 

Compare to Booker-nominated Keepers of Truth, this new novel by Michael Collins is less suspenseful but not necessary inferior. The theme of how middle-class Midwestern Americans live and survive is again explored by Irishman Collins. The protaganist travelled cross-country with his wife and 2 step-children to find out the mystery surrounding his uncle's death and to unearth secrets surrounding the fire that killed his own parents many years earlier.
Collins vividly painted a bleak landscape where middle-class Americans passed their time enduring cold weather, diner food, TV dinners, and countless reruns of old TV shows. The protaganist's cousin Norman lost his mind and the family farm under the bleak backdrop of Michigan. The sanity of Frank Cassidy is also questioned: what is real and what isn't? Who really set the fire that killed his parents? Who is the comatose man who allegedly is the suspect in the murder of Uncle Ward? What is his relations to Frank? The answers to these questions slowly unraveled as Collins explored the pysche of middle-classed Americans.

Truth seems to be at the center of Collins' writing. Truth was in his award-winning novel, The Keepers of Truth, a brilliant twisted tale of murder and mystery in small-town America. When I provisionally read the blurb, I thought, is this previously charted terrain. It's a reason I kept from buying the book until I found it second hand. (Apologies to the author.)
I could not have been further wrong, though The Resurrectionists concerns a murder, and its attenuated mystery, Collins has gone deeper, and created an intriguing and daring novel that charts the sub-conscious mind of a trouble man who witnessed, and was accused of setting the fire which killed his parents when he was five. The psychological trauma, and the narrator's subsequent care under psychiatrists who hypnotized him and his later episodes with shock treatment, create a fragmented and shifting reality, and as others have noted, Collins has deftly utilized the unreliable narrator technique like no other writer I've read. Collins' particular genius is wedding a story, idea and plot element to a literary technique, and here, Collins actually makes his reader experience the profound sense of loss and disorientation his narrator feels throughout the novel, as he moves close to solving the mystery at the heart of the novel - who is the mysterious murder suspect who now lies in a coma at the county hospital after having hung himself after killing the narrator's uncle at the beginning of the novel.
That Collins balances a mystery with a socio-political and psychological deep novel is noteworthy. He has an ability to make apparently simple stuff complicated, for isn't all life complicated at its core. What is misconceiving is how we don't see the ambiguities in life. Collins makes them shimmer. He goes digging in the dirt of the subconscious.
This was in my top two novels of 2002, second only by a hair's breath to, Middlesex.

The emotional and political landscape of The Resurrectionists is daunting, as is it's unusual and brilliant plot that keeps you guessing until the end.
Collins seems to be one of those rare writers who can shift between a novel of ideas and a novel of pathos and plot. You will not find a more motley, bizarre, and yet ultimately human array of characters laid out in a novel. Beginning as caricatures, each quickly subverts sterotype, and we see the humanity, the struggle each character endures.

Frank Cassidy is, at the risk of borrowing from other reviewers, an existentialist hero, a godless, souless creature who takes on a Camusesque acceptance of the world by the book's end. The anger and violence pent up in Frank is chilling. We are at times seeing through the eyes of a killer, a man on the edge. For a third of this novel, there is no guidepost as to how Frank will act. Despite moments of caring for his family, a blackness descends over him when pressured by economics and also by his apparent memory lapses due to episodes of shock treatment he underwent in his twenties. We are never sure which split personality will emerge.
As for Honey, this monsterous woman who was once the State Typing Champion for Macon Georgia starts out as caricature, but becomes one of the most interesting and enduring characters you will find in any book. Ranging from pragmatism to visciousness to pathos, Honey is as Frank says late in the book, like her name, sweet but can sting. Her relationship with an ex husband on death row adds another existentialist underpinning to this novel. The ex wants to let himself die and have his organs harvested. He has created an effigy of his former self out of skin and oil from his own body over his years in prison which he calls Bad Ken. This surreal image profoundly takes this book from realism, to surrealism, to moralism, to spiritualism, but always remains human at its core.
It is also one of those books you can pick up and just read for the sheer linguistic energy and power. Each paragraph or page is complete in itself.
All I can suggest is, take one of the most curious literary rides of the year, superior in its own way than Collins' shortlisted novel, The Keepers of Truth.' It's a book that flits between genres in such an ambitious, yet un-selfconscious way. It should be on everybody's top ten list for 2002.

Forgive the plot for its convoluted nature and give up the notion of any true clarity. This Collins contends is how his book should be read at a recent reading in Boston. With that in mind, the blurred sense of time and action do in the end serve to mimic real life. Real life is at the heart of this novel. With a loose plot that does end with poignancy, there is closure, but through much of the book we are seeing through the eyes of an emotionally scarred man, a man who underwent shock treatment. His wading through modern life, from the fantastical violence of holding up an old man, to the dead time at his job as a security guard at a small college in the Upper PI, Collins finds a perfect balance, lets us see into the full emotional weight of his character. This is where the novel finds its true grit, in a realism that makes your skin crawl.
Half mystery, more than half psychological, The Resurrectionists is a novel that resurfaces on so many levels.
One could talk forever about the marginal characters in this novel, Honey the new wife with a husband on death row, awaiting execution. This sidebar adds an eeire dimension to the novel, a dual journey. The effect on Honey's son, Robert Lee, is probably the best defense I've read on why we should not use the death penalty - for the sake of those left behind.
Radically different from The Keepers of Truth, this book further establishes Collins as one of the foremost writers writing about America.

With roadside nightmares abounding in this book, "limbo spaces," Collins called them on his recent book tour, and with a main character who thinks of himself as God during one haunting scene, the analogy to recent horrors in Washington DC can be made. At least Collins tried to allign them during his reading.
This novel is a chilling account of how close to the bone a man can come to becoming a psyhopath. Through the first third of the book, the sense of despair, violence and rage drips off the pages, but somehow it's not over-the-top, not given who Collins is writing about. The sense of disillusionment, paranoia and anger are there on the nightly news, and this book takes you to that heart of darkness.
I didn't agree with everything Collins had to say about how we reach out and change such characters.
Actually reading the book, I think Collins' overt politicization (he calls his books political) is tempered by a writing style that takes your breath away. The images are stark and searing, but reawaken our senses, let us see America again through a foreigner's eyes. The mystery also at the heart of the book moves with a great pace and it's not until the end that the mire of this character's live makes sense. The ending is one of hope, despite almost all of the book being dark. But the shift works. The Junior College scenes made me laugh out loud.
I don't know if I would have bought this book if the writer hadn't been reading in the store, or taken the time to talk to me afterward, so maybe I'm bias, but I think this is one of the more unusual and unclassifable books you'll ever read. I don't know if I'd call it entertaining. Its effect needs some other qualifier...

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