When his town's sleepy summer tranquility is shattered by an outbreak of diphtheria, Jacob Hansen--constable, deacon, and undertaker--stares at an impossible dilemma: save both himself and his family or observe his many duties? Although he's nearly convinced that it's possible to do both, the inexorable and crushing horror of Stewart O'Nan's fifth novel, A Prayer for the Dying, is that evil doesn't flinch, that its insistence can obliterate goodness, corrupt humility. "When won't faith save you?" Jacob wonders; the silence soon deafens him. An ostensibly inured Civil War veteran, Jacob watches helplessly as his neighbors in tiny Friendship, Wisconsin, are stricken with disease: simply hearing a mother say of her daughter, "She's sick," becomes chilling. Yet even as his wife and baby fall ill, Jacob patiently, dutifully tends to the helpless and buries the dead. When panic erupts, however, and he grapples with the tragedies accumulating before him, he feels the prick of spiritual doubt, even succumbs to violence. "Is this the devil's work?" Jacob asks as he struggles to discern the good in a world without order, watches those he serves turn against him, and disregards his own moral outrage.
O'Nan's style is taut and often oddly lovely, its immediacy braced by an unnerving second-person voice. The novel is, at root, spiritually terrifying. It forces us to consider at what remove we truly are from evil. Overwhelmed with checking his own despair, Jacob begins by pondering how to halt wickedness and ineluctably finds himself sustaining its slow creep. You wonder if he ever had a prayer. --Ben Guterson
From Library Journal
The sleepy agricultural community of Friendship, WI, provides an ideal refuge for Jacob Hansen, a Civil War veteran recovering from the trauma of battle. As if to atone for past sins, Hansen dedicates his life to public service, working as town sheriff, minister, and undertaker. But the quiet life Hansen cherishes is shattered forever when he embalms the corpse of a nameless drifter and inadvertently exposes himself and his neighbors to diphtheria. As sheriff, Hansen quarantines the town and begins burning the homes of those who have died from the disease. The more he tries to help, the worse things become. O'Nan (A World Away, LJ 5/1/98), named one of the best young American novelists by Granta, is a literary chameleon who seems to change his identity with each book. This is a beautifully written, heartbreaking work, modeled on Albert Camus's classic La peste (1947). Recommended for most fiction collections.
-?Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
O'Nan, following his previous novel, the somewhat stolid A World Away , which was set on the home front during World War II, is more surefooted as a historical novelist in his latest work, set in a small town in Wisconsin six years after the Civil War. Jacob Hansen wears two important hats in the little community of Friendship: sheriff and undertaker. It falls to him in his sheriff capacity to deal with the most horrendous crisis the citizenry has yet faced. The dead body of an ex-soldier is found at the edge of town; it is discovered by the local physician that the cause of death was diphtheria, a highly contagious and fatal disease that could spread quickly throughout the population. Sheriff Hansen must figure out how to contain the disease without causing widespread panic. Hansen, who truly loves Friendship and the part he plays in its community life, maintains his health, but his wife and daughter succumb. Practical questions surface and are difficult for him to answer: Is there a connection between the spread of the disease and a religious colony just outside of town? Eventually, a quarantine is necessary. Then a prairie fire threatens the town, and Hansen must rescue the individuals who are not ill by getting them to safety. A sad ending does not detract from the novel's effectiveness as a sharp, taut study of the goodness of the human heart in the face of the darkness that life can present. It's an amazing novel, at once highly realistic yet at the same time poetically metaphoric. O'Nan's readership grows with each book, and his fans will find this one his best to date. Brad Hooper
From Kirkus Reviews
ONan (A World Away, 1998, etc.) steps back in time and offers us a kind of Old West rendition of the Dance of Death as a diphtheria epidemic threatens to wipe out an entire town. Jacob Hansen is a man of many hats. A Civil War veteran, he has settled down to peacetime routines in Friendship, Wisconsin, where he does triple duty as preacher, sheriff, and mortician. Naturally, he prefers his role as pastor, but lately hes been pretty busy in all three capacities: diphtheria has broken out in the little town, and its Jakes responsibility to enforce a quarantine in the hope of checking its spread. This means completely cutting off Friendship from the outside world and keeping infected patients more or less boarded up in their own homes to die alone. And while the lawman in Jake sees the necessity of this step, his Christian sentiments rebel against such callousness. On the outskirts of Friendship a revival camp has been pitched by followers of a charismatic preacher named Chase, who has spent the last few months prophesying the imminent end of the world. When the disease infects their camp, Chase is not in the least surprised, nor does he become nonplused when word reaches town that a brushfire is raging out of control and seems headed directly for Friendship. Jake, however, is less willing to see the hand of God in the fire and pestilence surrounding him, especially after his baby daughter Amelia falls ill. A man whos lost only wants to go home . . . . Dont those souls in Hell, Jake asks, lift their faces to Heaven? The real question, though, is whether he and his family will be able to escape, since he finally decides that his fate is not to die in Friendship but to escape it aliveat any cost. Curiously slow and rather obsessively introspective, yet an extremely moving portrayal of faith and grief all the same. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"A cross between Stephen Crane and Stephen King . . . O'Nan is certainly among the strongest Americanwriters of his generation."--Peter McCarthy, The Washington Post Book World
"A fine, terse novel about the circumstantial nature of evil and the terrible fragility of man."--Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review
"Will make readers shudder and think and marvel at a writer's creation of an alien world that seems so real."--Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today
About the Author
STEWART O’NAN’s critically acclaimed fiction includes The Names of the Dead, Snow Angels, and The Good Wife. He lives in Connecticut.
From The Washington Post
"A cross between Stephen Crane and Stephen King...O'Nan is certainly among the strongest American writers of his generation."
