From Amazon.co.uk
The Resurrectionists finds Irish-born Michael Collins returning to the wastelands of Hicksville, USA: the same terrain as his Booker-shortlisted novel
The Keepers of Truth. Set predominently in an anonymous Michigan town--"the world capital of nowhere"--at the fag end of the 1970s, this is a slightly muddled, if endearing, family saga cum murder mystery. The book is narrated by Frank Cassidy, a man whose parents burned to death in suspicious circumstances when he was just a child. He has discovered that his Uncle Ward, who raised him, has recently been murdered. The prime suspect is in a coma but the police are certain he is Chester Green, the Cassidys' old neighbour (Frank always believed that Green was somehow involved in the fatal fire). There is however, one slight problem; Chester died of influenza 27 years ago. Abandoning his tedious job in a New Jersey fast food restaurant, Frank gathers up his clan--wife Honey (whose ex-boyfriend is on death row), stepson Robert Lee and dinosaur-obsessed son Ernie--steals a car and heads for Michigan in search of answers and possibly a share of Ward's farm.
Back in his Michigan hometown Frank settles down, gets a job and begins to unravel the enigmas surrounding his uncle's death with, genuinely, surprising results. Collins' might fill his tale with the kind of oddballs who tend to populate David Lynch films: one-legged encyclopaedia salesmen; rhinestone-shirted truckers, frazzled Vietnam war vets and enigmatic polyester-clad old-timers, but it is his touching, humorous descriptions of mundane family life that resonate. His television-addicted Cassidys owe a good deal to The Simpsons; their appetite for junk food, Sesame Street, The Brady Bunch and reruns of Gilligan's Island are carefully stitched into the narrative. At times Collins can mistake lists of their viewing habits for convincing period detail but this gripping, charming suspense novel offers a thoughtful snapshot of America shaking off Watergate and preparing for Reagan. --Travis Elborough
From Publishers Weekly
I couldnt quite get us back without incident for the burial of my father. We ran into a little trouble along the way. It took us two stolen cars along the interstate to get us home. Collins, an Irish-American writer whose last novel, The Keepers of Truth, was shortlisted for the Booker, has perfected the art of beginning a novel, as the sentences above attest. The year is 1979, and narrator Frank Cassidy is stuck in a dead end job in New Jersey. Orphaned at the age of five when his parents were burnt to death in a fire, Frank is still haunted by his past and fights off fits of clinical depression. He's married to Honey and has two kids, 14-year-old Robert Lee and five-year-old Ernie. Robert Lee is actually the son of Honeys first husband, a murderer now on death row. When Frank discovers by chance that his adoptive father, Ward Cassidy, was shot and killed on his farm in Cooper, Mich., he packs up the family and returns to his hometown, in spite of his stepbrother Normans advice not to come. With little to return to in New Jersey, the family decides to stay in Cooper for a while. Frank gets a job in security at a local college and in his spare time investigates the link between the mystery of Wards murder and the mysteries surrounding his own early life. The connection seems to hinge on the identity of Wards murderer. Is he really Chester Green, the presumably long dead son of a local farmer? (And why would Chester kill Ward?) Contrary to Scott Fitzgeralds oft-repeated dictum that there are no second acts in American life, Collins shows that second acts are what America is all about: for all the battered existences on display in this novel, there's a faith, a persistent optimism, that lifts them above the tawdriness of their details.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
