Rating: 
Summary: A suspenseful, compelling novel!
Review: 'I couldn't quite get us back without incident for the burial of my father." With that opening sentence, Michael Collins begins the most intriquing tale of the death of a family member since Faulkner's AS I LAY DYING." There is not a dull paragraph in this compelling, seamless novel set in New Jersey and Michigan in the 1970's in the dead of a winter described so well by the author that you can feel the cold. Mr. Collins certainly has his finger on the pulse of a certain portion of American society: they are blue collar workers who either didn't go to or never finished college. Their finest hours were often in high school. They travel by automobile because they cannot afford to fly and stay in Holiday Inns and steal the bedding from when they leave. They eat TV dinners and measure out their lives in TV soaps if they are so lucky as to remain alive. They are the poor underclass who cannot afford good lawyers so they receive the death penalty for their crimes, the ultimate joke on the poor from the rich in America. Yet out of this group Mr. Collins has created sympathetic characters whom you root for and care about desperately. Like Faulkner's Dilsey, some of them endure untold hardships and still survive. Who can know, for example, the pain of Frank Cassidy's stepson Robert Lee who must grapple with the burden of teenage angst plus knowing his father on Georgia's death row will soon be executed. Or the narrator Frank, who has had his brain fried from shock treatments, needing to know just what happened thirty years ago when his parents died. Even better than Collins' THE KEEPERS OF TRUTH, this novel is an amazing story of suspense, sorrow, death, despair and ultimately love. I'm not sure when we as Americans can start claiming the Irish Mr. Collins as our own writer but the time ought to be now. It is difficult to believe that the author of this page-turner was born in Ireland and not the U.S. I only caught him in mistakes twice. Women in America paint their nails with polish and would never say "varnish." Also, boys in the U. S. have over the years used oil, tonic, spray and gel but never "lacquer" to slick down their hair. But even Homer nodded. This is as good a novel as you will read this year!
Rating: 
Summary: Quite good
Review: Compare to Booker-nominated Keepers of Truth, this new novel by Michael Collins is less suspenseful but not necessary inferior. The theme of how middle-class Midwestern Americans live and survive is again explored by Irishman Collins. The protaganist travelled cross-country with his wife and 2 step-children to find out the mystery surrounding his uncle's death and to unearth secrets surrounding the fire that killed his own parents many years earlier.
Collins vividly painted a bleak landscape where middle-class Americans passed their time enduring cold weather, diner food, TV dinners, and countless reruns of old TV shows. The protaganist's cousin Norman lost his mind and the family farm under the bleak backdrop of Michigan. The sanity of Frank Cassidy is also questioned: what is real and what isn't? Who really set the fire that killed his parents? Who is the comatose man who allegedly is the suspect in the murder of Uncle Ward? What is his relations to Frank? The answers to these questions slowly unraveled as Collins explored the pysche of middle-classed Americans.
Rating:
Summary: The Big Chill
Review: Forget the pandering niceties of middle-American values, the sanitized prime-time banalities that plague TV, and journey with a modern Steinbeck, who takes us on a solitary journey across America in search of home and a new life. At least Steinbeck's Jode family had the collective solace of fellow Oakies while wandering West. There was a recognizable enemy. Here in late 20th century America, we face the disenfranchisement of a collective spirit. Frank the protagonist of The Resurrectionists, works as a short-order cook, isolated from his past, marooned in New Jersey in a dead-end life and dead-end marriage. He had two kids, one not of his own "begetting," a step-son, and one that is his own flesh and blood.
I would go further... There is a whirlwind of suspense, murder, pain and redemption in this novel. It was featured in our reading group, and it was a novel that was reviled and loved in equal measure, but the genuine vision and insights of the narrator and author cannot be denied. Not to everybody's tastes, but then again, taste should not be the discriminating factor in acknowledging the genius of a work.
The novel generated, let me be frank, a sense of antagonism between defenders and detractors, something that we've not experienced in the six years we've been meeting. I think the debate surrounded political ideology and social beliefs. The Resurrectionists pits us against a man who, despite his humanity by the end of the novel, is capable of murder and has an innate sense of survival. He is, as self-described, a scavenger at the edge of our consciousness' Scary stuff in the most real sense '
Rating:
Summary: Close to a Masterpiece
Review: Forgive the plot for its convoluted nature and give up the notion of any true clarity. This Collins contends is how his book should be read at a recent reading in Boston. With that in mind, the blurred sense of time and action do in the end serve to mimic real life. Real life is at the heart of this novel. With a loose plot that does end with poignancy, there is closure, but through much of the book we are seeing through the eyes of an emotionally scarred man, a man who underwent shock treatment. His wading through modern life, from the fantastical violence of holding up an old man, to the dead time at his job as a security guard at a small college in the Upper PI, Collins finds a perfect balance, lets us see into the full emotional weight of his character. This is where the novel finds its true grit, in a realism that makes your skin crawl.
Half mystery, more than half psychological, The Resurrectionists is a novel that resurfaces on so many levels.
One could talk forever about the marginal characters in this novel, Honey the new wife with a husband on death row, awaiting execution. This sidebar adds an eeire dimension to the novel, a dual journey. The effect on Honey's son, Robert Lee, is probably the best defense I've read on why we should not use the death penalty - for the sake of those left behind.
Radically different from The Keepers of Truth, this book further establishes Collins as one of the foremost writers writing about America.
Rating:
Summary: Yes There Is Life After New Jersey
Review: Frank Cassidy is a likeable, well-read lowlife with the most dysfunctional family since Cain and Abel. His marriage is disintegrating, his job is going nowhere, his stepson hates him, and his wife's previous husband, awaiting execution in Georgia, hovers around the family like a malignant phantom. Into this dismal picture comes news that Frank's father (actually stepfather, actually his uncle, Ward), has been killed. Frank has fantasies of going back and claiming his share of the family farm; maybe even unraveling his tortured past, sorting out what really happened when his parents were mysteriously killed in a fire many years before. Of course there are many complications between low life in New Jersey and new life in the upper peninsula of Michigan. For one, he isn't welcome; for another he has to steal two cars and $4000 to finance the trip. Strangely enough, you continue to like Frank, and you hope things will work out for him. And in strange, unexpected ways, they do. Along the way he tries to reconstruct his past, hidden behind layers of family secrets, and the destructive probing of an incompetent therapist many years before. And the surprise ending is really out of the ordinary. Michael Collins is an excellent writer, but the book does have some flaws. The dialogue is sometimes had to believe, too literary for the characters who are speaking it. The portrayal of psychiatric illness and treatment is so far from reality, even for the time portrayed, that it is a little embarrassing to the modern reader. The author should have done a bit more homework in this area. All in all, though, the book works, it is entertaining, it keeps you involved, and--yes--the characters do find new life. I recommend this book. Louis N. Gruber
Rating:
Summary: Mystery within a mystery within a mystery
Review: Frank Cassidy isn't sure what happened with his life, but he sure as hell wants to find out. Living on the bare necessities when he learns that his Uncle Ward, the man who acted as his father when his real parents died in a mysterious fire when he young, has been murdered. Or has he? Travelling to the frigid climes of Michigan's Upper Peninsula to "get what's his" out of Uncle Ward's estate, Frank soon finds that his journey is taking him more places than he anticipated. When he attempts to discover how his parents really died, as well as his Uncle, Frank takes a perilous journey inward as well, on a path of self-discovery and redemption. Michael Collins' excellent story is told with style and panache, reaching deep into the hearts of his characters and drawing them out realistically. Though the narrative tends to meander often, the story is engaging enough to hold ones interest.
Rating:
Summary: A Marvelous Book...
Review: I just finished this absorbing novel today, after carrying it around and reading bits and pieces for several weeks (it's WAY overdue at the library). In reading other reviews, I'm quite interested by the fact that both professional and Amazon.com reviewers found this to be a "dark" and "chilling" book. I didn't. I found out it to be a quite funny, and at times achingly sad, portrait of contemporary American life (conveniently set in 1979) by a talented Irish writer who gets about 95% of it right (Sorry Michael, we don't say "goddamn" nearly as much as you think we do). In short, this is a John Grisham book turned inside out (there's a reference to Collins on the back cover as the thinking person's Grisham). It is character, as opposed to plot, driven, and Frank is a wonderfully human character, a deeply flawed yet all too identifiable man. In a way, this is a "Grapes Of Wrath" for our times; Steinbeck's work was political, too, and this novel is political in the way literature should be (it forces you to question and think). The kids are a little too broadly drawn, there are a few too many TV show references, and perhaps it's about 30 pages longer than it should be. But I'm not usually interested in books by writers under 40 (I don't find them authentic), and this book really struck me. There's a sequence in the first 100 pages involving a robbery that's emblematic of the whole meaning of the book, and it's a good a sequence as I've read in a long time. Nothing else in the book quite lives up to it, but that sequence alone is worth the price of admission here (or library fines). Many thanks, Michael Collins, for this book. I ... loved it.
Rating:
Summary: amazingly thoughtful
Review: I was spellbound and pleased with every page of this book.
Take my advice and read it!
Rating:
Summary: Readering Group Debates the Mystery of This Book
Review: In an almost nightmare vision of loserhood, Collins takes us to the heart of darkness, then redeems his characters in one of the most chilling, heartrendering stories we have read. Not for the weak of heart, collins introduces us to a main character and his wife that you are bound to hate for their cruelty and neglect of their children at the novel's beginning. This book holds back no punches, its hard hitting realism, spine chilling in its portrayal of humanity, of the strange violence we can exert over one another. Everybody is looking out for their own interest here. This is man at his most savage and brutish, or at least it is for much of the characters and the places they occupy in this novel, and yet there is no denying the existence of such places, or their reality. This book is filled with nightmare and horror, but also, along the way, it is embued with a sense of resurrection and spirituality, and that transformation happens so slowly, but works in a magical way. From loser to an almost Jesus figure, Collins lets us glimpse the sadness and despair of modern life, to just how close people come to the edge, but pull back. It is truly a challenging and haunting novel.
Debated for hours, with its champions and detractors, we did arrive at consensus, that is a book unlike others we have recently read in a long time.
Rating:
Summary: American Existentialism - Sheer Genius
Review: In an epic family tale of redemption, Collins takes us to the heart of family despair, to that Michael Moore terrain of lower class America, and weaves together a plot and protagonist of such emotional complexity and sympathy, that surely the name Frank Cassidy should surface as a late twentieth century hero of American life.
Like all great books this work goes beyond plot, it encompasses an era, an ethos, a people. The hunting scene of birds being caught amidst a deep freeze is simply the best nature writing I've ever read, this coupled in the same chapter with such an exquiste Hemingwayesque treatment of getting drunk.
This book is steeped in language and blood, a book that reaches for the heavens and for the grave.
The unearthed truth at the end is a revelation that will stun you!
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