The action centers on Fishgut, the grungy dwelling that houses a motley assortment of dropouts. Parker, a mysterious itinerant, has disappeared, leaving behind his journal, which is exhumed, edited, amended, and eventually adopted as a holy book called the Good Zine. Taylor has assembled all the hallmarks of a religious creation story: a prophetic dream, a charismatic leader, eager apostles, and exegetical squabbling.
Unfortunately, he’s far more concerned with his creed than his congregation. His characters seem more like mouthpieces than genuine people. We learn little about them beyond their half-baked dogma, and the point of view shifts frequently.
Taylor’s knack for capturing voices of youthful disaffection drove his story collection “Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever.’’ But novels depend on rising action. Characters can’t just wander and brood. They have to be driven by passionate agendas, and the conflicts between them have to be dramatized.
Taylor endeavors to convey passion, but strains for effect. One woman’s erotic interlude becomes “a chant in unsprung rhythm,’’ that “blots out the chattering doubts of that demon her consciousness and there in that throbbing vacuum finds a space both limitless and impossibly close, where she is fearless and safe, prone in joy and trembling, the tremble that becomes the bodyquake.’’
Matters of religious devotion get the same overwrought treatment. “See them now on their knees in the leaves,’’ Taylor writes, as the believers unearth Parker’s journal, “dirt under their fingernails and racing eyes aglow . . . passing the revealed testament of their prophet from hand to urgent hand. Every moment of being is an apocalypse. Every instant the world is made anew.’’
Taylor wants to capture the grandiosity of revelation, but this hysterical lyricism makes his disciples impossible to take seriously. The emotions feel asserted by the author, not experienced by the characters.
