How wonderful to read such a glowing chunk of prose home-grown from a Southern writer. John Brandon is a master at creating a sense of place in his work. His brand new third novel, A Million Heavens, opens with an exciting sense of a clear-skied desert space in New Mexico, its milieu, and its people. Only, things are a little eerie. The book sets into motion with a cast of people aching on the verge of combustion. Like in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, one is a wolf. A few are musicians, which I love almost as much as wolves. The novel jumps constantly from character to character, entities that move dynamically closer to each other as the novel progresses. But the sense that overarches this narrative is a watercolor dusk over the desert. And, as is implicit on that final blank space after the last page, a dark night full of bright lights follows.
This is a short read—shorter than it looks with the beautiful McSweeney’s hardback cover, and it incidentally appealed to me as a short story lover. Almost every page turn prompts a rotation to a different character’s section and a totally different storyline. About halfway through the book, I became especially fond of this “Reggie” narrative, about a solitary boy in a weird purgatory of a living room with a piano. So I skipped ahead to a few more of his sections to see how much like a short story this one character’s narrative would be. I quickly found out that this is a novel, that there is really some power to this compound narrative. Brandon has crafted a long and textured braid of a story, and in the end, he leaves us with a clear note of resolution—the characters’ infectious aches subtly transforming into a triumphant glow.
Reminds me of: Mary Robison’s quirky organizational style; McCarthy’s serious, careful treatment of characters; Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit; the well-crafted sense of place in Brandon’s own Arkansas and Citrus County.
A Million Heavens by John Brandon, $24, McSweeney’s
by Whitney
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