Raised by his intellectual, atheist, urban parents, Cole sees his world shatter when they succumb to the flu. He’s sent to live in the supposedly safe enclave of Salvation City, the polar opposite to everything Cole has ever known and anathema to his parents’ beliefs. Brought into the family of Pastor Wyatt (called PW for short) and PW’s wife, Tracy, a woman of huge heart and limited brainpower (PW insists that God doesn’t care how smart you are), Cole struggles to adapt to a place where everyone is “Rapture ready’’ and the only thing worth knowing has to do with God.
Although Cole is loved and cared for by PW and Tracy, their attentions complicate Cole’s feelings about his parents and his past. Can he believe, as the community does, that his parents are in hell for not following a religious path? And if he can’t accept that way of thinking, then can he be a real part of his new community? While Cole had never completely fit into his parents’ world because he wasn’t good at school or sports the way they had hoped, he isn’t quite one of the brethren in Salvation City either. Where then, is his true place in the world and his own salvation?
Nunez’s writing is gorgeously spare, and she gets the life and the lingo of a teenage boy just right. Cole sprinkles his conversation with words like “vomitous’’ and “awesome’’ and “full-frontal-freak.’’ He doesn’t read and is proud of it at first, but he soon discovers a passion for reading and drawing comics, turning the superheroes into his own kinds of gods. His struggle with his memory, his insistence on finding his own truth even as two polar opposites seem to be vying for his heart and soul, make him poignantly heroic. As the encroaching terror of the ruined world is filtered through Cole’s mind, he begins to also experience the first sharp stirrings of love for an evangelical girl, and the novel gains an almost innocent kind of power.
What does it really mean to be saved? And what do we want to be saved from? When a visitor from his old life suddenly reappears, Cole is forced to confront his past and figure out what kind of future he wants for himself. In this gorgeously strange and apocalyptic coming-of-age novel, Nunez shows that the end of the world can offer a powerful possibility for a new beginning.
Caroline Leavitt’s novel “Pictures of You’’ will be published by Algonquin Books in January. She can be reached at www.carolineleavitt.com.
