Fancy Gap by Zak Jones

This review contains spoilers. Read advisedly.

The Lord is a terrific drug. Salvation is the high he promises. I invent nothing in saying this: we’ve all heard Marx’s comment that “religion is the opium of the people.” We also often forget that comment isn’t meant to be dismissive by any measure. Just preceding it in Marx’s text is the oft-omitted remark that “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” America’s God, its God of coal and chemicals, its opiate-God, its desperate lust for a deliverer, a messiah, are no exception. They are everywhere in today’s news because America is itself a suffering country, currently in the grip of a mass crisis of the heart and soul such as Marx described. Zak Jones’ first novel, Fancy Gap, is about America, its God and his cruelty. It speaks of an Appalachian America stricken with poverty, illness and substance abuse, and wracked with a thirst to be saved. It is the story also of how little America’s wealth and power proves capable of slaking that thirst—if to slake it is even its aim.

At the center of the story is the Fuquay family, among whom: Dalton, Jane, Messiah and Grace. Dalton is a troubled young man recently discharged from the U.S. Army with a mention “other than honorable.” Jane, his mother, is fighting cancer, chasing pill after pill with wine. Messiah, aka Messy, his little brother, spends most of his life at bible camps and in foster care, taunted for how different he is, abandoned by his family. Grace, the matriarch, the family’s grandmother, is a born-again preacher who dispenses fiery sermons and drugs to her flock in the mountains. Between these four characters, Jones anatomizes four distinct but related malaises. Dalton’s quarrel is with US military’s culture, but also with the coal industry later in the novel; a wanderer between jobs, trying to escape the shame of having abandoned his brother and mother. Jane’s battle is with her own body, her deteriorating health and with her church, one she sporadically attends, run by her former lover, the sinister, white-supremacist Pastor Hickock. Messy wants to find his family—or any family—again, not to be alone forever. Grace has run off from the real world into her own version of America’s apocalyptic fantasies: her way of trying to heal it. All of these struggle with “the grey monotony of modern America” (149) as seen and smelt by the novel’s keen and sensuous narrator.

The book keeps closely to these four main characters as the primary point-of-view focalizers for Jones’ third person omniscient narrator. The effect is that the reader lives as each of these characters scene by scene, incarnating into each of them in succession, but never without forgetting that each character’s perspective is part of a larger drama, a story the narrator is trying to tell from above as much as from within. Jones claims in one interview with Sean McNeely to not “advocate for anything” politically-speaking in this novel. This is true insofar as the book isn’t explicitly militant for any political cause. What is also the case is that whatever his narrator wants you to see, to feel and to revolt against, he has you experience in your senses first, in the skin of each character. You are reacting to the world much like Dalton, Jane, Messy or Grace are, and with the intensity of their personalities.

Much of the novel’s power comes from the sensuous exactitude with which Jones’ narrator renders the action. There are some truly ecstatic images at work in his prose. Jones for instance describes the sight of the Milky Way against the night sky as being “like dried semen on dark silk sheets”. He gives this observation through another focalizing character, Clyde, who is remembering a night spent with Jane. Clyde’s understanding of the universe quite literally bears the stain of love long gone but still remembered. In this passage, his memories of that time, “buried beneath the years of disciplined effort at forgetting [come] crawling out of the sky before him like spiders out of an egg sac”. We are in a very particular world, gothically, bawdily, bodily poetic. Messiah for instance notes that his foster home smells “like just-flossed teeth taste.” Clyde walks into a room that smells “like unbrushed teeth and spoiled milk, like an abattoir”. We are dealing with a novel held together with spit, sweat and cum, mildew and spiderwebs. It is a world littered with flies and “faded Mountain Dew” cans, “gas station boner pills” and empty bottles of wine. On every page, Jones shows us a world of sense that we might not want to, but desperately need to, look at and think about.

Oh, the arrogance of Americans. The ignorance. All this temporary madness, incendiary gladness! We either hasten the end, yes, we either hasten our salvation, or we hasten others to their very real, very assured damnation. It is the beginning and the end. Know it! Wake up and see God!

So preaches Grace to her flock in disparagement and thinly veiled despair. But the novel is also emphatically not a doomscroll experience. Somehow amid all this “temporary madness” there is still hope of relief that is not of an apocalyptic order. Against all odds, in the ruinous world of Fancy Gap, which is our modern world under American hegemony, there is still the dream of a better world of a less “incendiary” kind.

What the book also really says is that this better world will not come down from Heaven. It is here, grotesquely alive, with and within us. It takes shape in the small, intimate moments of affection and attachment that form between the novel’s characters. The penultimate chapter, titled not, as is Jones’ custom throughout, after the point-of-view character, but titled “Together,” ends with the spectacular image of Dalton and Messiah reuniting, arms reaching out to each other, as militiamen’s gunshots fire all around them. The book’s “Epilogue” ends with Dalton, Messiah, Grace and Jane reunited as though in a vision of Paradise. Salvation, the dream of “the assurance of forever, of forever and ever, and ever and ever, and ever and ever”, is a maddening drug, and the book ends in provocative ambiguity on the subject. While it ends on a note of love and togetherness, one that seems closer to reality and to true healing than the fictions of God’s love, it still doesn’t dispel the dream of salvation itself. Is our desperate need for love, that sanest of follies, not also its own order of addictive dream? Perhaps, but the love that animates Fancy Gap also makes divinity look insufficient by comparison. With love like that, messy, dirty, flawed and often painful as it is, there truly is no need for ministering choirs, stern preachers or legions of angels. “Amen”. 

James Dunnigan

James Dunnigan is a writer, scholar and editor from Montreal, the author of five poetry chapbooks. He was a finalist for the Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award, the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Award, the QWF Quebec Writing Competition and a winner of the Frog Hollow Press Chapbook Award. He has published in journals in the US and Canada like P-QUEUE, The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, Event, CV2, Maisonneuve Magazine and Hamilton Arts & Letters. He is currently completing a PhD in English at the University of Toronto. Find his website at www.jamesdunnigan.net.

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