Anatomy of a Miracle: A Novel* - Couverture souple

Miles, Jonathan

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0525574352 ISBN 13 : 9780525574354

Editeur : Hogarth, 2018

A propos du livre

Extrait :

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***

Copyright © 2018 Jonathan Miles

On the afternoon of August 23, 2014, Tanya Harris wheeled her younger brother, Cameron, to the Biz-E-Bee store on the corner of Reconfort Avenue and Division Street in Biloxi, Mississippi. Nothing about the afternoon or about Cameron or about Tanya herself suggested this would be her final time doing so; she was merely out of cigarettes, and her brother, slack-faced and sulky on a day that felt lethally humid, short on beer.

Tanya Harris is a squat, wide-hipped woman of twenty-nine whose gently popped eyes lend her face an expression of perpetual surprise or amazement, and whose flat-footed manner of walking appears consciously orchestrated, as though she’s never outgrown the fear of stepping on a crack thereby breaking her mother’s back. She’d recently dip-dyed one side of her hair, which is naturally a dingy shade of blond faintly slashed with premature gray, and on this afternoon streaks of a vividly chemical pink spilled down one side of a white T-shirt on which was printed hap-pay hap-pay hap-pay. Pushing her brother’s wheelchair down the center of Reconfort Avenue, to avoid the uneven jags of the sidewalk and the mini-dunes of sand swept there, she maintained the freewheeling stream of humming, commentary, rhetorical questioning, and singing that is her hallmark to family and friends. (“She does not shut up,” grumbles her brother, with acerbic affection. “Not ever.”) The chorus to Jay Z’s song “99 Problems” came flitting between observations about the “swampy-ass” August heat and her sharp denunciation of a neighbor whose neglected laundry, drooping on a mildewed clothesline, had already weathered, by Tanya’s reckoning, its third rainstorm. “Gonna need to re-wash every one of those shirts,” she muttered, over the fwap fwap fwap of her flip-flops spanking the asphalt. The sight of a chow mix, chained to a ginkgo tree in another neighbor’s front yard, elicited the same cluck of pity it had been eliciting from her for almost a decade.

Her brother Cameron wasn’t listening; or, if he was, he doesn’t remember it. As he explains: “She repeats things two or three times if you’re supposed to answer.” But Cameron was also, by his own admission, “a little out of it.” He’d popped his first can of Bud Light at noon, to wash down the Klonopin and Concerta he was taking for anxiety and memory loss, and he’d followed that beer with three, maybe five more. “Thermal angel blood,” he calls it, a reference to a blood and intravenous fluid warmer he’d seen medics use during his combat tour in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan was the last place Cameron ever walked—more precisely, on a ridge outside the mountain village of Sar-Dasair, in the Darah Khujz District of Zabul Province, where, in the early hours of March 22, 2010, Private First Class Harris and a fellow soldier wandered off-course during a foot patrol. Cameron was roughly twelve yards away when the soldier, a staff sergeant, stepped onto a PMN-2 land mine—a buried remnant from the former Soviet occupation. The explosion sheared off the staff sergeant’s legs, genitals, and right forearm and blasted seventy-nine pieces of shrapnel, along with bone shards from the sergeant’s legs, into Cameron’s body. One or more of those fragments severed the nerves of his lower vertebrae, instantly paralyzing him below the waist. Two doctors at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany divulged the permanence of his condition to him on the evening of his twenty-second birthday, bookending the news with brief and awkward apologies for the poor timing.

Cameron’s most prominent physical feature, paralysis aside, might be the long alabaster scar that runs down the side of his face, from just below his left temple almost to his jawline. It’s a squiggly, sinuous scar, evoking a river’s course on a map, but it’s not, as one might reasonably presume, collateral residuum from Afghanistan. The scar dates to his early childhood, when he slipped while running on a slick fishing pier and snagged his face on a nail. The scar only adds to the rugged, almost harsh cast of his face, which is further amplified by his high Cliffside cheekbones, sharp-cornered jaw, the military-specs trim of his blond hair, and an angry vein in his neck that pulses and squirms from even the mildest aggravation. His eyes, however, cast a different spell: They’re wide and large like his sister’s, with a peculiar boyishness to them, as though his eyes retired their development at puberty while the rest of his features forged ahead. They impart a dissonance to his expressions that can sometimes be jarring; his temper, when it flares, can seem both fearsome and puerile. Most of all, however, those eyes highlight the gross tragedy of what happened to him in Afghanistan—that he had yet to fully graduate from boyhood when he was struck down in the Darah Khujz.

On this particular August afternoon, Cameron was dressed in his usual way: a T-shirt, this one advertising the Mississippi Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo, atop a pair of baggy black knee-length nylon shorts, and on his sockless feet a pair of red Nike tennis shoes that he sometimes called his “front bumpers.” The home that he and Tanya share is a narrow, half-century-old shotgun-style house that wasn’t designed with a wheelchair in mind, and, without shoes, his insensate feet often bore bruises from colliding with sheetrock and door frames.

Their hometown of Biloxi occupies a skinny, six-mile-long peninsula that juts eastward into the Gulf. For most of its history Biloxi was a fishing village, with canneries lining the water and shrimp boats and oyster luggers docked in its harbor. Immigrants drawn by jobs in this seafood industry—Slavs and Italians especially—lent the city an idiosyncratic seasoning, tilting its spirit more toward south Louisiana than to the rest of Mississippi lying north of the salt line. “Most were Catholic,” as the former Biloxian Jack Nelson explained in Scoop: The Evolution of a Southern Reporter, “and they brought with them a more relaxed attitude toward drinking, sex, gambling, and other human frailties.” In the 1950s, when the state dumped leftover dredging sand on the coastline to create an artificial beach, Biloxi began advertising itself as “the Poor Man’s Riviera,” a Deep South analog to Coney Island. Elvis Presley vacationed here. Jayne Mansfield had just left a Biloxi supper club, in 1967, when she died in a car wreck on U.S. 90. Casinos arrived in the 1990s, adding another layer of sheen, and yet, for all its synthetic, tropical-print ease and its tolerance for frailties, Biloxi has never comported itself like a resort town. It bears no illusions of itself as a paradise. It doesn’t mind the smell of fish guts. Its hands are cracked and calloused and it sweats a lot.

The Harris house, near the end of Reconfort Avenue, where the street dead-ends at the CSX railroad tracks, is the only house Cameron and his sister have ever known. Their parents bought it in 1985, just after Tanya was born. After their father left for an oilfield job in Texas when Cameron was three, and failed to return, the children remained in the house with their mother. They remained in it, too, after their mother was killed in a car accident on I-10 when Cameron was sixteen. And they remained in it as well—if more accurately beside it for a time, during the year they spent living in a FEMA trailer—after the storm surge from Hurricane Katrina devastated their East Biloxi neighborhood, their house included, just fourteen months after their mother’s death. “The back bay kinda swallowed up the whole street, and flooded us up to the ceiling pretty much,” Tanya explains, with a detachment that seems oddly clinical until you consider that Katrina, following so closely their mother’s death, was, for them, less disaster than aftershock, loss tailing loss.

The hurricane also explains why the house—which a group of volunteers from an Indiana church, with Cameron’s help, put back together—is so starkly devoid of family history. The living room, once a shrine to their mother’s porcelain collectibles, contained on this day a black vinyl couch, purchased at a Rent-A-Center closeout; a television propped on cinder blocks; a blue plastic coffee table upon which an Xbox video game console sat nestled amid its black burrow of cords; and nothing else. The walls, like those of every other room in the house, were unadorned, and painted the blunt white shade of mold-resistant primer. The only photographs of

Cameron and Tanya on display were the sole images, predating Katrina, that they know to exist: a half-dozen snapshots, taped to the refrigerator door, that came in the mail from an aunt in Alabama whom the Harrises visited twice as children. Every one of them is a group shot, with Cameron and Tanya posed beside cousins whose names they don’t remember. “That’s all we got,” Tanya says, pressing a fingertip to one of the photos—the only image of their mother they possess—as if to sponge a nano-droplet more memory from it. She hums, grunts, smiles. “Poor Cameron’s gotta take my word for it that he was such an ugly little kid.”

The outside shows minor neglect—curls of peeling paint, a cracked windowpane, knee-high weeds poking through the concrete—but no more than some of the other surviving houses on the street. At least half didn’t survive the storm surge: Nine years later, Reconfort Avenue remains pocked with empty lots. Forgotten-looking for sale signs stand wiltingly in a few of these sand and-scrub parcels, occasionally joined by newer-looking signs advertising, in English and Vietnamese, legal counsel for oil spill claims resulting from the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the spring of 2010. The effects of that spill greeted Cameron’s return home from Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas, adding insult to very literal injury—or loss tailing loss tailing loss tailing loss, an interminable freight train of misfortune. “I remember Tanya bringing home a sack of oysters, for this ‘Welcome Home’ deal she did for me, and saying, ‘Well, Tippo says these might be the last Gulf oysters we eat in our lifetimes,’ ” Cameron recalls. “And I’m thinking, well, shit. A lotta fucked-up shit’s happened to me, right? I mean, I could go down the list, you know. But no more oysters? Goddamn, man. I was just like: Maybe life’s really over now.” It’s unclear how earnest he is when he credits the oysters’ comeback for his endurance of a six-month murk of depression, though oysters—invariably cornmealed, fried, and slathered with ketchup—do comprise a notable share of his diet.

Of the street’s pre-Katrina residents, only two other households remain. One is a large Vietnamese fishing family known to Cameron and Tanya as “the Ducks” (a mangling of their surname), who keep sharply to themselves. The other is Mrs. Dooley.

Eulalie Dooley is a ninety-one-year-old African-American woman who’s lived on the corner of Reconfort and Division, directly across from the Biz-E-Bee, since 1965, when her late husband, Bobby, took a job with a local seafood processor. While working as a housekeeper and later as a home-health aide, she raised four children in that house, and later three grandchildren as well. She was the only resident of Reconfort Avenue who refused to evacuate for Katrina, which she survived—just barely, and, when one considers her age and frailty, rather magnificently—by climbing into her floating refrigerator. As the water rose, she punched out ceiling tiles using the sponge mop with which she’d armed herself for the storm. (The only chore Hurricane Camille had required of her, in 1969, was swabbing the floors; she’d expected similarly light duty for Katrina.) That feat of survival, reported on CNN, drew the Indiana church group to her home. A surplus of its volunteers moved down the block until they found the Harris house, teeter-tottering amid a sunbaked slosh of debris and yellowy mud, which they set upon with reciprocating saws and hammers and Midwestern Methodist cheer.

To longtime residents of Reconfort Avenue, Mrs. Dooley has always been known, fondly, as “Neighborhood Watch.” This is owing to her omnipresent vigils on her compact front porch, which, by her request, was the first thing the church volunteers rebuilt on her house. It’s not uncommon to see Mrs. Dooley on her porch at sunrise, quilting or crocheting while rocking in a chair that a charitable CNN viewer shipped to her “all the way from Florida,” nor is it unusual to see her there after dark, beneath the bluesy glow of a bug zapper, needles still flashing in her ever-kinetic hands. Despite the intricate demands of her stitch work, every passing car, whether familiar or not, is accorded a generous salute, her left arm fully raised, her arthritic wrist avidly swishing. As Cameron says: “It’s like our street’s got its own Walmart greeter.”

To him and Tanya, making their daily and sometimes twice-or thrice-daily walks to the Biz-E-Bee, Mrs. Dooley tended to offer more than a wave. “How y’all babies doing?” she’d call out, leaning forward in her chair, or, “What you babies out shopping for today?” From Cameron in his wheelchair she’d usually get a wan thumbs-up, or a meek and uncomfortable-looking shrug. He’s never quite outgrown his fear of Mrs. Dooley, dating back to when she caught him, at the age of ten, setting off fireworks beneath cars, after which she ordered him onto her porch and slapped him three times hard on his backside then told him to head straight home and have his mama to slap him there another three times. For years thereafter, up until Cameron’s mother died, instead of waving Mrs. Dooley would point a stern and crooked finger at Cameron as he’d pass by on foot or on his bicycle, denoting her surveillance. “That boy was never really trouble,” she says of the young Cameron. “More like he was always almost trouble.”

From Tanya, on the other hand, Mrs. Dooley’s greetings yielded reams of small talk, the kind of blithe sentiments you holler across a front yard, and oftentimes requests for Mrs. Dooley to hold up her latest stitching project for Tanya to see. On the afternoon of August 23, Mrs. Dooley was halfway through a lighthouse-themed quilt, which she was proud to exhibit. Tanya, whose mother collected porcelain lighthouses (“pretty much porcelain everythings”), told her it was looking beautiful. As artists are prone to do, Mrs. Dooley challenged the compliment by inventorying all the mistakes she’d made, forcing Tanya to pause the wheelchair in the street in order to acknowledge them all and politely object to some.

Cameron, Mrs. Dooley recalls, never glanced up. His expression looked dazed and bleary to her, but she didn’t think much of it; she knew he took painkillers, and chalked his torpor up to their effects. She didn’t know, or didn’t remember knowing, exactly what’d happened to Cameron or where it’d happened—just that he’d walked off to war, the same way her husband had back in 1942, but, unlike Bobby, Cameron hadn’t come walking back, he’d come rolling. Roughly twenty years before that she’d watched Cameron totter around the Harrises’ front yard in his diapers, his little pale legs fat like stacks of donuts, Tanya always shuffling alongside him with her arms splayed wide like a basketballer guarding against the fast break, C...

Revue de presse :

Praise for Anatomy of a Miracle

“Funny, bighearted...Miles specializes in giving fully rounded humanity to characters who might elsewhere be treated as stock figures...pitch-perfect.”
— New York Times Book Review

"Jonathan Miles's masterful new novel Anatomy of a Miracle documents the slo-mo explosion of an attention-grabbing event with trompe l'oeil flourishes...Miles is a writer so virtuosic that readers will feel themselves becoming better, more observant people from reading him... Part of why Anatomy feels so expansive is that Miles takes every opportunity to delve into the characters' backstories... but this keen interest in people is part and parcel of a book in which the author describes humans as 'extraordinary' at least three times. In Miles's world, everyone — not just the people shouting loudest on the internet — is worthy of attention."
— Los Angeles Review of Books

"The impossible happens in... Jonathan Miles's latest novel, Anatomy of a Miracle. But it's what occurs before the astonishing event and what unspools after that will break open hearts and imaginations... Miles's powerful prose nudges readers to seek the soft spots between faith and judgment, story and science, and fact and fiction."
— CJ Lotz, Garden & Gun

"Anatomy of a Miracle by Jonathan Miles is a novel that reads like a true story. It's about a US veteran whose paralysis from the War in Afghanistan is miraculously cured. Cue a media frenzy and you finishing this story in days."
— TheSkimm

“Brilliant, moving, suspenseful, funny, rich, and humane....by far his best work. It’s a robust and powerful story about humanity, hope, loss, and courage. And LOVE. Cannot recommend it highly enough, truly!”
—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love and Big Magic, on Instagram

“Heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny.”
— Books Inc, in the San Francisco Chronicle

“[Anatomy of a Miracle] is a remarkable combination of medical mystery, satire and war story. Like Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, it captures the long-lasting effects of war by focusing on those for whom war is only a tangential thing somewhere far away.”
— Shelf Awareness

“Jonathan Miles’ smart exploration of everything from the excesses of American popular culture to the deepest aspects of religious belief roars to life... A vivid portrait of our need to believe and its unintended consequences... Anatomy of a Miracle is a thoughtful modern morality play that’s as current as the latest internet meme and as timeless as the foundations of faith”
— BookPage

"Miles possesses a rare and admirable command of structure and style, shifting smoothly from Afghan patrol tactics to Catholic doctrine to neurological science; his sentences are thick with data, wittily delivered. ... An expertly shaped tale about faith in collision with contemporary American culture.” 
— Kirkus (starred review)

"Vibrant, bustling, and humorous... Cleverly shaped as a journalistic report, and told in a style similar to that of John Jeremiah Sullivan and Ron Currie, Miles' tale offers a nuanced and endlessly entertaining exploration of the age-old debate between faith and reason."
— Booklist

“With sincerity and wit, Miles pens a strong, sardonic rumination on the religious boundaries of the miraculous.”
— Library Journal

"Affecting."
— Publishers Weekly

“Jonathan Miles has written a novel whose comic moments alone make it a wonderful read, but Anatomy of a Miracle quickly becomes so much more: an intense, and intensely profound, meditation on how an extraordinary event might test the limits of both scientific and religious belief. What a superb writer; what a superb book.”
—RON RASH,  New York Times bestselling author of Serena and Above the Waterfall
Praise for Dear American Airlines:

“Wildly entertaining...not just philosophically but emotionally rewarding.”
—Richard Russo, New York Times Book Review
 
“This is writing that pulls no punches...There’s a satirist’s edge to [it], an over-the-top sensibility reminiscent of Tibor Fischer and John Kennedy Toole. Satire, to be sure, is part of the point, but Miles is after something bigger—a story of reconciliation, of redemption, of a character trying to become unstuck.
—David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

“A flinty, funny, irreverent, and heartbreaking first novel. The writing reminded me of brilliant, early-days Martin Amis—except with redemption and hope. It’s not easy to write a book this good, but Jonathan Miles makes it seem effortless.”
—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love
 
“Miles is a rare original who has pity and sympathy for almost everybody. Bravo.”
—Barry Hannah, author of Airships
 
“I loved this novel, which is strong medicine indeed.”
—Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall
Praise for Want Not:

“Well, I loved this book. I don’t know if it helps you or anyone to delay that assessment, so I won’t. Jonathan Miles can write, and here he’s written a wonderful book, and there’s no one I would not urge to read it...This is the work of a fluid, confident and profoundly talented writer who gets more fluid, more confident and seemingly more talented even within the book itself. As it progresses, Want Not so assuredly accumulates power and profundity and momentum that I read the last 200 pages without pause.”
—Dave Eggers, The New York Times Book Review

“Immensely satisfying...while [Mr. Miles] is presumably capable of writing a bad sentence, he doesn’t do so here, despite the big swings he often takes with his prose...gripping and memorable.” —New York Times

“With a light Midas touch, Miles turns all the glut and ache of late America into pure gold...Read this book. It is warm, complex, comic, honest, and never flinching. Want Not wastes not a word, while its pleasures are endless.”
—Joshua Ferris, author of To Rise Again at a Decent Hour
 
“A powerful, blisteringly funny novel...Miles mines the depths of waste so artfully that by the end of this extraordinary novel, we’re left with the suspicion that redemption may well be no more, and no less, than an existential salvage operation.”
—Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Hogarth
• Date d'édition: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0525574352
• ISBN 13: 9780525574354
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 368