Book Review: Readings

By Penny Van Horn

The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

Norton, 423 pp., $24.95

It's no surprise that half of the people saying nice things about The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint on its back jacket describe it as "Dickensian." If there's a recently published novel that is more Dickensian than The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, it must be hiding in a dark, lonely Dickensian closet. The evidence: From the age of seven on, Edgar Mint is an orphan, and from very nearly that age and for several agonizing years into his future, he's a ward of what is possibly the most Draconian boarding school ever imagined, one that sits forlornly on an Indian reservation in deserted Arizona and should be thought of as a penal institution with a few teacher types thrown in for effect. And like Dickens, Brady Udall is able to unite the seemingly disparate threads of his expansive story at the very last moment in a revealing, fitting way.

But The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint is set largely in the New West of weary Mormons, doped-out loners, and hardened ideologues, so Udall, with his attentive ear for the way people really talk, their spare idioms and throwaway words, conveys someplace entirely different than Victorian England. The violence that opens this novel is sudden and awful but almost comically bored: For some reason, 7-year-old Edgar has inconveniently placed his head under the mailman's jeep while the mailman is inside having a word with Edgar's mother. After the mailman unwittingly squashes Edgar's head with his left rear tire, he tries to save Edgar but nearly has a nervous breakdown and flees Arizona. Later, Edgar realizes that his purpose in life is to hunt down the mailman -- it doesn't deter someone like Edgar that he doesn't even know the mailman's name -- and inform him that he didn't die.

Edgar, who is half scrappy Apache and half restless white boy, has to survive the toughest ordeals of his entire life before he is 17. After being sat upon and fed nonedible items by a 300-lb. bully at the Willie Sherman Tecumseh School on the reservation in Arizona and watching his best friend Cecil being carted away to juvie, Edgar decides that it might be in his best interest to take two missionaries up on their offer of sending him to live with a sweet Mormon family in Utah. Once he's there, he writes Cecil that:

The hall bathroom is the best one. It has pink carpet all over the floor and little soaps like roses and naked babies on the wallpaper. Smells like flowers, but better. There is carpet ON TOP of the toilet, right on the lid, and the seat is padded like you're sitting on a couch! I stay in there as long as I want until somebody tells me it's time to come out.

Also, it's very CLEAN here.

Of course, just because Edgar is free from pummeling doesn't mean that trauma of a less pronounced nature isn't seeking him out; he must be the most stubbornly hopeful creation in all of recent fiction.

Udall has an ability to infuse each of his characters, even the minor ones, with a personality all their own. His rollicking story may falter here and there but the ups and downs are well worth it.