Drive to Survive

Where should we place our faith in times of upheaval? Some might suggest family, God, money, government, literature, or television. Others might say the future, history, nature, ourselves alone, or nowhere at all. How, though, would we know that such faith was well placed? These grand questions and tentative answers reverberate across Rob Benvie’s ambitious and incantatory fourth novel.

Set in the 1950s, The Damagers follows the plight of recently orphaned, adolescent sisters, Zina and Presendia, as they flee their former home — which burned down — and head heedlessly into the Adirondacks. After a few days in the woods, they encounter a mysterious “tall man” who offers them water and a place to stay. He brings them to a group of exiles, misfits, true believers, and burnouts led by Peter, a charismatic and temperamental man who “fancied himself a latter-day Amos.” Quickly embraced by this quasi-millenarian sect, Zina is assigned to serve as Peter’s scribe and turn his convoluted jeremiads into a new gospel wherein “all will be reimagined” and “hope will be bred.” Occupying a place at the centre of this disorganized cult yet persistently yearning for a life beyond it, Zina is faced with figuring out what she wants. Her traumatic past threatens to catch up with her while a slowly encroaching interstate highway development endangers the future of her new pseudo-family.

Wasting little time establishing the narrative engine and quickly narrowing his focus to Zina alone, Benvie primes us to expect a traditional coming-of-age story. As she grows up, Zina learns to balance her desires with her responsibilities and tries to reconcile her past as a daughter and older sister with her new role. Although she is buffeted by a litany of impulses and destructive forces, her work as a scribe prompts her to reckon with the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive and how, so often, they do not quite accord with reality off the page. We watch Zina move through adolescence into young adulthood, but we gain little insight into the extent of her growth and self-understanding.

Instead, Zina’s experiences serve as a window into postwar America. Through her alternately pensive and impassioned posture, we encounter a world both sacred and profane, portentous and ridiculous. She may be the protagonist, but the novel’s focus seems to lie far beyond the particularities of her perspective and interiority. Alongside Zina, we are jostled across a shifting cultural landscape. We encounter a former member of the Manhattan Project in awe of Enrico Fermi and uranium, “the divine isotope.” We tour a nearly defunct and shuttered sanitarium. We meet a prescient titan of industry who anticipates the rise of televangelism. We spend time with a practitioner of the “ceromantic arts” who cannily tells fortunes in her store next to a laundromat. We learn of a pulp science-fiction author and read a second-hand account of his enigmatic story that may or may not be the metaphorical key to the text’s many mythologies. Everything is seemingly as important (or unimportant) as everything else. The book is rife with methods for making sense of its references but remains agnostic as to which way — if any — might be best.

In this respect, Benvie’s latest reads like an extension of postmodern systems novels — like Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland or Richard Powers’s early fiction — albeit written with the solemn verve of mid-career Cormac McCarthy. That said, it would be unfair to say that this story is simply high postmodernism revised to fit our post-everything moment. As with his use of narrative conventions, Benvie seems intent on using formal strategies to unusual ends. Amid its cyclical and disorienting plot, The Damagers sustains an argument about how to live in a society that forsakes conviction and beckons nihilism at every turn.

Woven throughout the text are quotations from Keats, Coleridge, Blake, Emerson, and Whitman — fragments that Zina recalls from her time being home-schooled. With these evocative references, Benvie draws our attention to the history of the search for clarity during troubled times. He crafts a subtle and splintered genealogy that yokes together the Romantic reaction to the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, the transcendentalist response to industrialization and the American Civil War, and mid-century pop culture’s rejoinder to Fordism and the Second World War. Like the works cited within it, The Damagers is a salvo across the bow of a crisis-ridden age, a barbaric yawp over the roofs of the contemporary world.

Despite meandering turns and seeming dead ends, the novel suggests that there may be a way to weather the distractions and disturbances of modern life, such that the grand, philosophical questions fade and we can simply live within the immediacy of the present. A short, surprising coda from the perspective of Presendia, set in 1974, highlights the folly of focusing too closely on making meaning at the expense of living. “We’re all just fools,” she thinks, “stumbling around, banging into one another.”

A rueful and ruminative tale, The Damagers presents a case for hope against hope, for a faith invested not so much in any one thing but rather in our capacity to live — fully live — in the face of an inevitable, undesigned, and unknowable future. In the end, it might just be that, as Zina puts it, all that matters is “continuing, finding a way” forward, especially when it seems impossible.