Rating: 
Summary: A Dark Allegory Shines
Review: Set against the troubled psychos of our Cold War era, The Resurrectionists works as allegory, a tale of a dysfunctional family who embark on a journey across America in search of answers to an old family secret. Beginning as a road novel, the book moved across America, a journey back in time, from the heat of New Jersey to the refrigerator cold of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. This is one of the most ambitious novels you will read this year, or any year.
What is at the heart of this "Cold War Story" is the uncovering of Truth, a recurrent theme in Collins' work. The conceit in the book is that our history was kept from us during the paranoia of the Cold War politics, both by our political leaders, Nixon and Co. Everybody in the book is reacting in someway to Nixon's betrayal in the book. Frank, the main character has a adopted son Robert Lee who has a Nixon pez despenser, his father who's on death row killed the people he did in the wake of watching the Watergate hearings. Also, at work is the fact that uncovering history, or finding the Truth is almost impossible. Things become jumbled, we have to rely on people to tell us what happened, therefore, history is open to interpretation. All this may sound too intellectual, but garbed in the story and characters Collins presents, the allegory works brilliantly.
Throughout the book, the use of reruns is masterfully manipulated, so that themes, and moments have a deja vu feel. The main character, having been a victim of Shock Treatment and hypnosis for an event he witnessed as a child, is unreliable, and his sense of history is skewed. For much of the book, we wonder if we are getting the real "Truth." With so many divergent themes that do come together, it's hard encapsulating this book. There's the Sleeper, the comatose figure who murdered a man who lies dormant. What secrets does he hold? There's the main character working through his own memories of the past, there's the wife with the ex-husband, a guy on death row who wants to be executed, who is giving his organs up to his hosts. His wife fears he will come after her in the body of one of these hosts.
Mixing the surreal, the gothic, the crime genre, the literary novel, Collins gives us a virtuoso performance, an outside looking in at us. This is by all accounts a near literary masterpiece of emotional and psychological fallout, a starkly told and often brutal and political novel, but for all its apparent bleakness, it is a novel of hope. It shows in quite an extraordinary way toward the end, how we Americans survive. How Collins pulls off this twist, how he gets himself out of the mire of despair is again testimony to his insight into the American Condition.
Rating:
Summary: The Cold War
Review: Taking the apparent simplicity of a small town murder as its hook, Collins subverts the murder mystery genre in this highly unusual, psychological novel. Signposted with cultural references, we are transported back first to the late seventies, then further back to the fifties, wherein lies the secret to unraveling the plot. The sheer level of detail, both physical and psychological, the mood of the novel is done brilliantly. The Resurrectionists is a form of time travel.
Peppered with a host of surreal characters, from Frank's wife Honey to their two children, Robert Lee and Ernie, we share the foibles and fears of a family. We witness the interplay of nurture vs. nature as the two kids are exposed to the manic wandering and searching of its two main characters. We see life weigh down on the children with such moments of bone chilling realism that it reminded me of seeing people at stores who attack their children, or abuse them. The instinct is to protect them. However, the relationship with the children is far more complex, abuse, love and ultimately acceptance comes through. There are no easy answers in this novel. It's complex, often disorienting, given we are dealing with a narrator who is unreliable, a victim of shock treatment. What makes this novel stand apart are the moments of poignancy, bone chilling realism, and at times horror of real life. It holds no punches. It depicts a side of life and people we are at times wont to turn our backs on.... Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Politics, Pathos and Plot
Review: The emotional and political landscape of The Resurrectionists is daunting, as is it's unusual and brilliant plot that keeps you guessing until the end.
Collins seems to be one of those rare writers who can shift between a novel of ideas and a novel of pathos and plot. You will not find a more motley, bizarre, and yet ultimately human array of characters laid out in a novel. Beginning as caricatures, each quickly subverts sterotype, and we see the humanity, the struggle each character endures. Frank Cassidy is, at the risk of borrowing from other reviewers, an existentialist hero, a godless, souless creature who takes on a Camusesque acceptance of the world by the book's end. The anger and violence pent up in Frank is chilling. We are at times seeing through the eyes of a killer, a man on the edge. For a third of this novel, there is no guidepost as to how Frank will act. Despite moments of caring for his family, a blackness descends over him when pressured by economics and also by his apparent memory lapses due to episodes of shock treatment he underwent in his twenties. We are never sure which split personality will emerge.
As for Honey, this monsterous woman who was once the State Typing Champion for Macon Georgia starts out as caricature, but becomes one of the most interesting and enduring characters you will find in any book. Ranging from pragmatism to visciousness to pathos, Honey is as Frank says late in the book, like her name, sweet but can sting. Her relationship with an ex husband on death row adds another existentialist underpinning to this novel. The ex wants to let himself die and have his organs harvested. He has created an effigy of his former self out of skin and oil from his own body over his years in prison which he calls Bad Ken. This surreal image profoundly takes this book from realism, to surrealism, to moralism, to spiritualism, but always remains human at its core.
It is also one of those books you can pick up and just read for the sheer linguistic energy and power. Each paragraph or page is complete in itself.
All I can suggest is, take one of the most curious literary rides of the year, superior in its own way than Collins' shortlisted novel, The Keepers of Truth.' It's a book that flits between genres in such an ambitious, yet un-selfconscious way. It should be on everybody's top ten list for 2002.
Rating:
Summary: Existential adventure
Review: The hero is a pragmatist in a Godless world. The protagonist, Frank Cassidy, had not had a day off in two years when he quits his job in New Jersey to go the the Upper Peninsula, Michigan for reason of a death in the family. He steals a car and later robs a man named Melvin. Frank's brother-cousin and his wife, Norman and Martha, dread the arrival of Frank and Honey and Robert Lee and Ernie, the children. In the boarding house where they stay there is a hint of opulence. It is learned that the body of the deceased uncle, Ward, is being held by the authorities. Honey feels they should try to get jobs in the town. Frank works as a security guard and Honey in the business office of a college undergoing a transition from a community college to a four years residential college with a Great Books curriculum. For Thanksgiving it is decided to eat at Cedar Lodge and stay there through the long weekend. Listed winter activities are ice skating and ice fishing. In a telephone call Frank learns that his cousin Norman is collapsing. Norman upended the sheriff's car when served with papers of foreclosure. Frank and his family go to Norman's place where it is discovered the dairy herd has been killed. In the end Frank uncovers and clarifies mysteries that have always surrounded his boyhood. The atmosphere created by the author matches the subject of the search for meaning by being indeterminate, foggy, bewildering. The children are presented in interesting realistic detail.
Rating:
Summary: Existential adventure
Review: The hero is a pragmatist in a Godless world. The protagonist, Frank Cassidy, had not had a day off in two years when he quits his job in New Jersey to go the the Upper Peninsula, Michigan for reason of a death in the family. He steals a car and later robs a man named Melvin. Frank's brother-cousin and his wife, Norman and Martha, dread the arrival of Frank and Honey and Robert Lee and Ernie, the children. In the boarding house where they stay there is a hint of opulence. It is learned that the body of the deceased uncle, Ward, is being held by the authorities. Honey feels they should try to get jobs in the town. Frank works as a security guard and Honey in the business office of a college undergoing a transition from a community college to a four years residential college with a Great Books curriculum. For Thanksgiving it is decided to eat at Cedar Lodge and stay there through the long weekend. Listed winter activities are ice skating and ice fishing. In a telephone call Frank learns that his cousin Norman is collapsing. Norman upended the sheriff's car when served with papers of foreclosure. Frank and his family go to Norman's place where it is discovered the dairy herd has been killed. In the end Frank uncovers and clarifies mysteries that have always surrounded his boyhood. The atmosphere created by the author matches the subject of the search for meaning by being indeterminate, foggy, bewildering. The children are presented in interesting realistic detail.
Rating:
Summary: Confronting one's demons
Review: The Resurrectionists is by far one of the best books I have read in a while. At the heart of the novel is a mystery. Frank Cassidy is a guy whose station in life is defined by a dead-end job at the near bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. He is mired in an unhappy life with a wife, Honey, and two kids, Robert Lee and Ernie. Frank has suffered terrible trauma as a child. He has witnessed his parents burning to death in a fire thirty years ago and the scars from the incident run deep. "The way I saw it in life, there were only two states," Frank explains, "either you're trying to recapture the past or trying to escape the past." When Frank learns from a newspaper that his uncle is dead, that past comes chasing after him. Frank decides to leave his job and life in New Jersey and move his family up north to Michigan to (if nothing else), lay some claims on the family farm. Desperately poor, Frank manages to ferry his family to Michigan using a series of stolen cars. Once in small town Michigan, Frank discovers that explaining the past might not come easy, especially when there are so many unanswered questions. His uncle has been shot, but by whom? The alleged killer hangs himself and lies in a state of permanent coma. What was the killer's (The Sleeper's) motive? Why is Norman, Frank's brother, slowly losing his mind? To answer these, Frank must exercise his own demons and confront some tough answers. Frank's wife, Honey, in the meantime, has issues of her own. Her ex-husband, Ken, is on death row. She and his son Robert Lee try to cope with the impending loss in ways unique to their respective personalities. Collins has set The Resurrectionists in the America of the late seventies. The Watergate hearings and Skylab form essential background here. Frank and his family spend most of their waking hours watching endless reruns on television. The reruns serve as an excellent metaphor of the cultural stasis of American life in those times. At a broader level, the novel hints at Biblical overtones set in very contemporary settings. Frank of course, is a "resurrectionist" coming back to take control of his past. "There was something prophetic about all of it," Frank says when he drives back to Michigan from New Jersey. "Like beginning a journey across the river Styx to the land of the dead, a journey back to the center of things, to secrets I had not let myself think about in years." Collins is a master at painting pictures of small town American life-the diners, a snowbound campus, even a highway rest stop at McDonalds. The images are searing. Apart from the wonderful storyline, the one mighty plus for The Resurrectionists is Collins's absolutely brilliant pacing of the plot. The book is wonderfully engrossing and surprises are thrown at you right until the breathtaking end. The Resurrectionists might be called a mystery novel, but it really is so much more than that. It is a book that will hold your attention right till the very last page.
Rating:
Summary: Intrigue and Blurred Political Mystery
Review: The unlikely murder of a non-descript farmer in the Upper P.I. charts one of the most amazing socio-political conundrums of our time - how we ended up undermining ourselves and our politics during the Cold War, how we buried our secrets and ended up spying on ourselves... e.g. Nixon and Watergate.
This bone chilling allegory highlights an era of my life, those crazy days of paranoia and fear when we were afraid to look into our own soul. An aberrant, and xenophobic politics ruled for much of my life, always under the guise that we were facing ultimate destruction, which we may have been.
The Resurrectionists takes the elements of the time, shock treatment, tapes, TV reruns, and creates a frenetic and disorienting vision of a time that was, frankly, hard to understand. Somehow all these elements, gut fear, anxiety, paranoia, are communed in the novel. It's a novel that stands apart from the contemporary navel-gazing that passes for literature at the moment.
Rating:
Summary: chilling and poignant eulogy to our past
Review: There is nothing quite like the disquieting genius of this book, the dream-like skewing of reality and truth, that captures so chillingly, and sometimes disturbingly the free-fall paranoia and despair of its characters, and yet ultimate redemption. Set in the early eigties, but dealing with the mysterious death of the main character's parents in a fire in the early fifties, we are taken on a journey through space and time, first on a road journey from New Jersey to Upper Michigan, then a journey back in time to a sort of 50's esque world of paranoia and secrets. Here we find some strange characters, a murder suspect who has hung himself and exists in a coma at an old Polio and mental institution. It is into this bizarre world of psycho-analysis that the main character must venture to understand a secret 30 years old.
Coupled with this Collins adds another dimension, the main character's wife who was previously divorced and has a husband on death row. His death looms throughout the book. The husband wants to his organs donated for medical purposes, however, his wife suspects, he wants to come after her.
In strange ways Collins brings us face to face with moral and ethical questions. It is often only upon reflection, you see understand what you read which is a weird and discomforting aspect of this book, but works because of the subject matter. I confess to rereading chapters, and in a way that is what the book is about, reruns, about returning again to history, to a story.
Collins has done something few writers are capable of doing, a work where both its content and its style are interwoven in a virtuoso way.
The end will blow you away.
Rating:
Summary: A Pleasure to read
Review: This book is a pleasure to read. The writing style is effortless - Mr Collins is a skillful and inventive writer.
The story follows a 1970s family who return to the Frank Cassidy's hometown for his dad's funeral. As the mystery around the death unfolds, other themes are also addressed. In a couple of generations Frank's family has moved from primary industry, mining and farming, into the service econony (flipping burgers). The novel shows the impact on families, on men and women and their ideas of their place in the world. Some people can survive in the modern world of corporate farming, of colleges which free people from their tie to the soil. It is not an easy journey but the ability of people to survive shines through, especially when the benefits of education are used to change for the better. In the background the impact of a war fought overseas is also in the air.
Ultimately, a novel about hope. Perhaps even an update of the American dream? Great book, deserves more recognition.
Rating: 
Summary: Mysteries wrapped into snow
Review: This book seems to start out on the wrong foot. It is narrated by Frank Cassidy, somebody with only a rudimentary education on the lower rungs of life. You wonder where he gets all that penny-ante philosophy and the flight of lyrics from: "We were all nobodies at our essence". Or "The silver scratches of falling rain". That kind of writing can be irritating. But, later, we meet up with the characters of the book, such as as the wife Honey and the children Robert Lee and `Ernie, Franks uncle Ward Cassidy, the neighbors Sam and Chester Green, the psychiatrist Dr. Brown, Ward's son Norman and his wife Martha. They all are what you would call "damaged goods". The mystery at the center of the story is: Who killed Frank's parents who dies in the arson of their home. And what goes on with "The Sleeper", who lies in a waking coma at the local hospital. And who killed Ward Cassidy? The story is told with great skill, lifting the vail of a snowy landscape only a little at a time, keeping you guessing. You get a feeling of floating along with it, never able to penetrate the various mysteries. In that respect, it is a great novel. The solution to it all comes on the last few pages. It makes convoluted sense, but is far from satisfying. The novel might have more impact if it had been told straight forward, without Frank's ruminations.
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