'Mission to America': The Apostles' Greed - Walter Kirn

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

'Mission to America': The Apostles' Greed

By PAUL GRAY
Published: October 16, 2005

Over the past decade or so, Walter Kirn has been to literary journalism what Bill Gates is to software. His graceful, authoritative reviews and essays have appeared in Vanity Fair, Vogue and Esquire; he served stints as the book critic for New York and the literary editor of GQ; he is a contributor to Time, and his work is featured regularly in these pages as well as in The New York Times Magazine. And if this glamorous résumé isn't enough to drive envious freelancers wild, there's the added wormwood that Kirn has accomplished most of his Manhattan triumphs while living among the scenic splendors of Montana.


But everybody has a hungry heart, as someone or other once observed, and Kirn's success as a reviewer, those envious free-lancers may take some small comfort in learning, is not quite what he had in mind. In a 1999 interview with the Princeton Alumni Weekly, Kirn, class of '83, said, "My primary ambition is to be a fiction writer. . . . Being a critic wasn't an aspiration of mine." Kirn has indeed written fiction: a collection of stories, "My Hard Bargain" (1990), and three novels, "She Needed Me" (1992), "Thumbsucker" (1999) and "Up in the Air" (2001). All received respectful, occasionally rhapsodic attention. None reached an audience anywhere near the size of that commanded by Kirn's high-circulation, highly visible critical outlets. So millions of readers know him as a critic who sometimes writes fiction rather than as a novelist who reviews on the side.

"Mission to America" may tilt that imbalance in the other direction. Kirn's fourth novel is his most ambitious attempt yet to create an independent fictional universe, one that is less content than his previous books to piggyback on contemporary phenomena like the abortion debate ("She Needed Me"), the therapy craze ("Thumbsucker") and the deracinated, unanchored world of frequent flyers ("Up in the Air"). At the same time, his story fuses two topics that have been prominent in American literature and the national dialogue almost from the beginning: the seductive bounty of the New World and the spiritual rewards of organized religion.

Mason Plato LaVerle, the novel's young narrator, has spent his life in the isolated mountain valley town of Bluff, Mont., the headquarters and indeed the only enclave of the Aboriginal Fulfilled Apostles. "We approved, that's the main thing," Mason explains. "We approved abundantly. We approved of the Prince of Flocks, whom others call Christ, and of our God of Gods, the-All-in-One, but we also approved of a host of other divinities, majestic and humble, familiar and obscure, from tricky Old Coyote, the Hopi spirit, to dainty Lady Vegetalis, a garden sylph of cloudy origins."

The opening chapters of "Mission to America," in which Kirn fleshes out an imagined faith, are a tour de force of unobtrusive exposition. (Mormonism, which has often figured in his previous fiction, clearly provided Kirn with a helpful template.) We learn, as if by accident, of the Apostles' mid-19th-century founder, the first of an unbroken line of Seeresses: "A woman named Lucy. Apostles call her Mother. She lived a life of quiet charmed attainment. She mastered the whole Hebrew language in one daydream." Scattered references enumerate the many dietary instructions handed down from Mother Lucy, including her emphasis on fish. ("The only fresh fish to be found in Bluff was trout.") There is the uneasy relationship with the rest of the United States, which church founders called Terrestria, "refusing at first to vote in its elections, supply troops for its armies or recognize its currency, and though they capitulated in 1913 in a bid to escape imprisonment, Bluff had remained a world apart."

Such isolation has come at a price. Despite their defining motto, "What Should Be, Is," the Apostles realize that What Is Won't Be for much longer. "Yes," Mason says, "we were safe from assault, debased philosophies, bewildering images and harmful foodstuffs, but in our safety we'd thinned and paled and dwindled. Our blood was weak, like children's milky tea." Ennis Lauer, an Apostle who has ventured into the outside world and won half a million dollars on a reality TV show, puts the case somewhat more bluntly to Mason than he put it to himself: "This faith has turned into an endless ladies' tea that starts with a prayer and closes with a séance and accomplishes precisely nothing except to turn Tuesday into Wednesday and February into March." Lauer has conceived and financed a plan to help prevent Bluff's "biological sunset." Young Apostle men will go out to find brides to provide "new bloodlines into our active breeding pool" and also, not entirely as an afterthought, converts, preferably rich ones. So it is that Mason and Elder Elias Stark, a former schoolmate, drive off in a green Dodge camper into the roiling unknown of Terrestria.

A compendious bibliography could be assembled of authors (Cervantes, Montesquieu, Swift, Dr. Johnson, Mark Twain, to mention just a few marquee names) who have set naïfs loose on the open road, literal or figurative, for philosophic, satiric or comic effect. Kirn is aware of this tradition and makes a few feints in its direction. Mason, along with his partner, becomes awestruck at his first exposure to television and excitedly reports on "squealing shows," in which Terrestrians "discontented with their clothing and furniture were showered with new things they weren't yet sick of." Yet Kirn clearly isn't much interested in the sustained mockery of such easy targets. Nor does he make much of a mystery about whether his proseletyzing rubes will be corrupted by the depraved environment and people they meet on the outside. Elder Stark succumbs almost immediately to the lure of junk food, from which it seems a short hop to crank and then, once he acquires some rich friends, to prescription drugs of uncertain provenance and purport.


Mason is also changed by his mission, and that transformation forms the real subject of the novel. Zealotry is largely unknown among the Apostles. How could it be otherwise with a people who believe that What Should Be, Is and that "Forgiveness and Creation were the same act"? But Mason is even less zealous than his co-religionists. He cherishes his childhood in Bluff: "We knew we were missing something by living there, but they, the outsiders, were missing something, too." He admires but is uncertain about the usefulness of the truths set forth in Mother Lucy's "Discourses," the Apostles' holy book, such as, "The cheerful fall is the highest sort of flight."

From the moment he leaves Bluff, Mason understands that all he cared about in his past is lost. He knows that Lauer's plan is crazy. "He thinks," he tells Elder, that "we can . . . win the hearts of two darling banker's daughters who can't wait to move to Montana, drive junky cars, pray in a building with a caved-in roof, have three kids apiece and eat trout six times a week. He's dreaming." Worse than that, Lauer is back in Bluff, where the 97-year-old Seeress is dying, reorganizing the faith's hierarchy and telling Mason over the phone that "if the church has any financial future at all, it's as a human growth enabler."

As it winds down, "Mission to America" depends increasingly on zany plot developments - a corrupt Colorado zillionaire, a writer held hostage to construct the zillionaire's autobiography, a bison hunt for plutocrats - all of which amounts to a letdown, of course, but also points toward the disappointment of most fictional endings, the tendency of inspired premises to fade into the light of common day. But the glow of the initial vision remains after the book is closed. "Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea," John Updike once observed. With this novel, Walter Kirn has ventured into deep waters.

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Looks like Walter Kirn was raised Mormon.. hmm... puts the criticisms in a better perspective... --CSR

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Walter Kirn
hosted by Tony DuShane

"From one of our most admired and visible young writers, a superb new novel about the collision between the forces of faith and an overstimulated, overfed, spiritually overextended America.

Walter Kirn is one of the most acute observers of contemporary American life that we have. In Mission to America, he harnesses that gift to a satirical yet moving tale of a stranger in a strange land that just happens to be our own."

-Quote taken from Random House b/c they said it perfectly.

Kirn is also the author of Thumbsucker which has been adapted into a film.

In our interview we talk about his book as well as his Mormon background, masturbation (seems to be a re-occurring theme here) and how Walter was discovered as a writer.  :wtf:

http://www.drinkswithtony.com/walterkirn.html

http://www.filmjunkie.com/drinks/walter ... 1-27-1.mp3
http://www.filmjunkie.com/drinks/walter ... 1-27-2.mp3