Lookout Mountain, Ala., 2014. A 70-year-old man called the Prophet lives alone in a dilapidated cabin in the woods. A former welder and drinker with possible wet brain and lung cancer he is reluctant to treat, the Prophet grows and sells fruits and vegetables — potatoes, beans, peaches, squash — sometimes with a healing song. The Prophet’s wife died of cancer years ago. His only son, a singer, has left him for Nashville. The Prophet owns a shotgun, but he “did not believe in any kind of killing, not capital punishment, abortion, suicide.” He trusts no formal church.
Born Winston, he calls himself the Prophet because of his visions: cinematic, Bible-inflected, appearing to him on a hallucinated screen before his eyes. He sketches, paints and sculpts these images using detritus: a fish drawn on a cardboard box, a white-robed man on fire painted on the roof of his old van, an “Ezekiel machine” assembled out of found metal blades. But his most important vision — one he is waiting to convey to President Obama by way of a messenger he calls the “Big Fish” — involves the apocalypse and cooling towers: “I seen bee soldiers flying out of them hives,” he says, “believing they are the most powerful army in history.”
It is while scrounging for materials for his Ezekiel machine at the local junkyard that the Prophet first sees Michael, a 14-year-old girl with zip ties on her wrists in the back seat of a car. Perceiving that Michael is not only a child in need of saving, but also his Big Fish, he rescues her from her captors — sex traffickers who gave her “enough pills to not have to feel it all the way” — and takes her back with him into the woods.
After he detoxes Michael from her opioid addiction, while refusing the sexual advances she has been conditioned to think she owes him, the Prophet and the young girl form a heartening friendship. He feeds her nourishing food and introduces her to the back-to-the-land joys of tending chickens and crops. She cooks, nurses him in his progressing cancer, and paints word-art for him. But Michael has a secret, a time-sensitive issue she must take care of; and when the Prophet provides her with a plan to go to Washington, D.C., to relay his apocalyptic vision to the White House, the plan coincides with her own plans. She goes willingly.
Just as the Prophet makes art out of detritus, Quatro alchemizes gloomy subject matter — sexual abuse, terminal disease, mental illness, poverty, suicide and American decay — into transcendent beauty. The author of the story collection “I Want to Show You More” and the novel “Fire Sermon,” Quatro writes with the musicality and command of a mystic poet. Her sentences are also propulsive; the novel is a page-turner that leaves readers feeling deeply invested in the fates of the Prophet and Michael, individually and together. If anything, Quatro could have slowed her pace a bit more to allow for a deeper exploration of this unusual relationship.
Thematically, the novel takes on numerous dichotomies: good versus evil, optimism versus realism, punishment versus redemption, God’s will versus free will. Yet rather than pitting these seeming polarities against each other, Quatro skillfully mines the gray areas between them, the realms of ambiguity that are far more indicative of the human experience. Readers are asked to draw their own conclusions, and the ending offers several possible interpretations to choose from.
Structurally, the novel shifts in perspective from an omniscient third-person narrator, to the first person, to a brief second-person address and a mini play. Some of these formal experiments, like the shift into Michael’s voice two-thirds of the way in, are more successful than others. The voice of the titular Two-Step Devil, who lurks in the corner of the Prophet’s cabin, embodies, at various points, the Prophet’s self-doubt, capacity for destruction, revelation and, of course, evil — in short, the novel’s underlying preoccupation with whether virtue and sin can ever be written in black and white, whether one can ever give way to the other.
Theologically avant-garde and emotionally supple, “Two-Step Devil” is a Southern Gothic novel for fans of Denis Johnson, Frank Stanford and Wendell Berry, infused with the genre’s requisite imagery of “thick blankets of kudzu” vines and smells of “blood, grease and sweat.” And, like her forebears, Quatro wrestles with what it might look like to find and embrace a living faith in the modern world.
The post An Unlikely Pair’s Difficult Pilgrimage From Rural Alabama to the White House appeared first on New York Times.
