[Bison Books; 2010]
by Max Rivlin-Nadler
As if torn from Wise Blood, Robert Vivian’s Lamb Bright Saviors begins with the awesome image of an imposing reverend crossing the modern-day Nebraska prairie, railing about salvation and trailed by an attractive teenage girl dragging a stack of bibles in a red wagon. The preacher turns a pirouette in the air, and falls face first into the dirt. The girl begs some drunks by the nearby reservoir to help him into a house up the road. But the death throes of the Reverend Mr. Gene and the bedside performance of his kidnapped companion, Mady, have all been rehearsed. In hotels and stables across the West, the reverend has attempted to perfect his dying sermon. Too bad it doesn’t make a lick of sense.
Not that Robert Vivian is concerned about a specific school of metaphysics or a prescribed road to salvation, although the crowd gathered around the preacher during his dying speech sure need some type of change. A collection of burn-out friends, they take turns musing on their dreadful lives and the horrible act they committed a few years before. Poet-philosophers all, they can produce turns that may or not make sense: “There’s a mystery to darkness just like there’s a mystery to light, and we are both of them at the same time and no one can come to the end of it and explain what it means.” Their exploration of the Midwestern soul, the battle of the ethereal and the domestic, though tortured and sometimes beautiful, is often too heavy-handed and circuitous to feel like the characters merit our attention. Instead, the reader is drawn to Mady, who wails beside the dying preacher.
Perhaps by making the preacher contain no greater wisdom, Vivian has damned his novel to simply being a poetic stab at men looking for god and finding Him everywhere. But then there’s Mady, not vacant, not looking for salvation, who is robbed from her mother, and brought across state lines to help deliver the Word. She is a hopeful, honest narrator and I wish there was more of her.
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