Hell [Hardcover]

I liked this book. I had read the New York Times book review and picked up a copy on a whim.

Butler's view of Hell is that it's full of people, almost all people that have ever lived. They're tormented, but not really too much. People occasionally catch on fire or are caught in a flaming sulfurous rain or feel compelled to throw themselves off of a building, but it's still a far cry from a Bosch painting.

Hell in this novel is really about compulsion. Bill Clinton is forced to unzip and wait for any woman to come by, Anne Boleyn is still obsessed with Henry VIII (although nominally she is Hatcher, the protagonist's, girlfriend). J. Edgar Hoover still cross-dresses.

There is very little retribution or punishment in this hell, other than a little Hitler hunting. The punishments that are inflicted on individuals are more psychological and personal than societal.

The main character is a TV anchorman named Hatcher. His job gives him carte blanche to travel around Hell and meet interesting people, with Dick Nixon as his autohomicidal chauffeur, no less. Along the way he discovers that he has free will because Satan cannot read his mind. He then sets out on a quest to reach heaven, loosely aided by Judas Iscariot and Virgil, among others. He sets out to accomplish this by contacting his ex-wives to find out what was wrong with him.

What happens when he achieves his goal is what the book's really about. What is heaven? What is hell? And maybe, just a little bit of what is life? That's the question that the author really tries to poke at, I think, although I'm not sure how successful he really was at that. The ending was a little predictable, IMHO, although where he places the road to heaven is kind of novel.

All in all, a good read with great descriptive passages and a surprisingly strong set of characters, although maybe not so surprising, given that he had all of history to work with. Anyone who likes Vonnegut or Tom Wolfe would probably like this book.

For the record, the Kindle formatting was atrocious, dropping letters all over the page.

There's a line of Baudelaire's that aptly describes Robert Olen Butler's depiction of Hell: "An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom." This isn't to say HELL is a tedious read --- far from it --- but think less fire and brimstone and more the sorrowful regret of Hades, the traumatic everyday reductio ad absurdum.

This is a thoroughly modern Hell --- one that advances with the ages of humanity, a kind of torture for older "denizens" who find themselves increasingly lost in an advancing world. There is TV. There is email. There are traffic jams, which are eternally long. And the sex is always unsatisfying, no matter how hard you try otherwise. This being Hell, every moment of your day is an opportunity for Satan to have his way with you, but his tortures are subtle and mundane. To break up the normal humdrum of Hell, there's the occasional violent physical trauma: Cerberus is rabid and on the loose again, or flaming hail comes down in large enough chunks to burn and shatter your body until it reconstitutes. But whether this is a worse form of torture than hitting your knee on the coffee table every time you walk past it is one of Butler's bemusing unanswered questions.

HELL spares no expense on the living and recently deceased. In the Dantean tradition of gleefully devising tortures for individuals the author doesn't like very much, there's no shortage of historical and recent celebrities, politicians and public figures suffering in unique ways: William Randolph Hearst is reduced to a blogger who can't figure out CAPS LOCK; George W. Bush is the Wile E. Coyote to Bin Laden's Road Runner; Bill Clinton waits in a seedy motel for a girl --- any girl --- who never comes. There's also some odes to Dante's version of Hell: there remains wandering nomads stalking each other while leering. But while in the rather un-PC INFERNO this is the punishment for homosexuality, Butler's Hell assigns this fate to celebrity bloggers, doomed to launch petty barbs at each other for eternity. Unrestrained by a rather limiting nine circles, Butler's Hell is tailor-made to each damned soul, and it becomes increasingly obvious that no souls have escaped Hell's grasp. Religious leaders of all the major faiths repent in vain.

HELL is more atmosphere than anything else. It's detailed but elusive, denying easy categorization or comprehension. Hell has a way of continually escaping our understanding: denizens find their way drawn into tortures they never expected, Satan seems more or less schizophrenic, and the Great Metropolis is an endless grid of streets named Peachtree and Lucky. But it's also one of the most charming views of eternal suffering you're ever likely to read.

The plot concerns a network newscaster, Hatcher McCord, now anchorman for the "Evening News from Hell" (whenever evening decides to show up), who's dating an often-headless Anne Boleyn still attached to her beloved Henry VIII. But Hatcher is more interesting as a vehicle for us to learn about Hell and its carnivalesque practices. McCord is a combined Virgil and Dante: as confused as the rest of us, but still an experienced denizen capable of giving us a complete tour. As a foil-type character, he (rather cynically) shows us how Hell isn't that much different from life: everyone is there, too trapped within their self-torturing minds to recognize the suffering of those around them. Much like Earth, Hell offers oases of horror --- often the horror of self-realization in a desert of the mundane. It's a barbed truth that takes some time to sink in, but once you begin to suspend your disbelief about Butler's Hell, it feels almost self-evident.

Unfortunately this plot is often clumsy and aimless, dropping storylines to pick them up only much later (if at all) and possessing so little continuity as to be too confusing, even for a surreal portrait of the underworld. The satire at times feels overdone. McCord is a charming character, but wouldn't be interesting enough in his own right were he not a foil for the rest of us. But his suffering and attempts at redemption (a rare attempt for the long-suffering, defeated denizens of Hell) are genuine, and HELL rewards its readers with a heartfelt, but not maudlin, conclusion offering a restrained, human form of redemption as the answer to false messiahs and blind faith. There's hope for us, somewhere.

--- Reviewed by Max Falkowitz

This is a good book. It's rare -- a provocative book that raises serious questions but is very entertaining, and even a fast read.

Robert Olen Butler won a Pulitzer Prize for an earlier book, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. He's an excellent writer who writes almost breezily about serious subjects. Here the subject is self-absorption, conscience, guilt, and redemption. The lead character is Hatcher McCord, anchorman for the Evening News from Hell. If that sounds odd, it's representative of how Butler treats life in Hell. It's not just pools of molten sulfur (although it sometimes is) so much as a depressing version of ordinary life, with seemingly everyone who ever lived on Earth gathered to suffer together. At one point, Hatcher and one of his ex-wives sit reflecting on their lives together on Earth and in Hell:

Hatcher thinks: We only hurt each other. "Why are we here?" he says, softly.
"We were always here," she says.

That is the question that Hatcher poses to his on-air interview subjects, including J. Edgar Hoover, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, and even Satan himself -- "Why do you think you're here?" Each, with the exception of Satan, answers with some account of what they have done to deserve being in Hell. But another way to take the question, especially given how much Hell resembles ordinary life, is, "What is my purpose in Hell?" or "What am I here in Hell to do?" That would seem an especially poignant question, given that you will be there forever.

Hatcher is there to escape. Everyone wants to escape from Hell. And Hatcher comes to believe that escape is possible.

The question is what escape would mean. Everyone is in Hell, suffering all together. Where else is there to go? Who would be there? What would Heaven be?

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