Joshua Wheeler’s novel The High Heaven (Graywolf, 352 pp. $28) takes readers on a peculiar journey, reminiscent of the 17th century allegory, A Pilgrim’s Progress, or, closer to our time, the lyrics, “What a long strange trip it’s been,” from the Grateful Dead’s Truckin’.
Wheeler, the author of acclaimed essay collection, Acid West, opens this tale with a New Mexico rancher’s discovery of a child, Izzy, alone in the woods, orphaned after authorities clashed with a doomsday sect that her mother belonged too.
The story is inspired by a UFO cult that actually built an interstellar runway and tried to resurrect a dead person near White Sands. Wheeler gives Izzy plenty of uncanny mannerisms, with a particular focus on her luminescent jade-colored eyes that occasionally seem to leak a strange light.
Izzy keeps her ears pinned to the radio, waiting for a message from God who the cult believed sent aliens to Earth like angels. A strange trip, indeed.
As Izzy’s story unfolds over nearly seven decades. Wheeler ties her fortunes to 20th century and contemporary triumphs and tragedies, especially those related to U.S. space exploration, beginning with the first Apollo launch in 1967. The moon, with its connective reality and poetic draw to Earth and Earthlings, also takes a leading role in this tale.
Years later, after Izzy creates a tragedy at the ranch that costs lives, she hightails it out of White Sands. The rest of her story runs though Texas and eventually to New Orleans.
Along the way, Izzy hooks up with some bizarre characters as difficulties and tension mounts, while she continues to struggle with alcohol, drugs, and headaches. That includes a fateful encounter with a Vietnam War Army chaplain delivering the worst possible news to a family about their son. She is obsessed with televisions, finding a way to use them at times while wrestling with the dilemma of humankind’s purpose in the universe.
The book is salted with descriptive writing and also takes the occasional, introspective, deep dive into the human condition. For example:
“There is, on occasion, in one’s middle age, an unaccountable grief that takes hold, grief for a life you don’t have and maybe never even imagined, but now the grief, paradoxically, animates that other life, the one that might have been yours, a life of slightly more ease, slightly less heartache, some glamour, sure, but mostly just less struggle, less war and death, perhaps.”
While the story grabs attention, it ocassionally wanders into weirdness to the point that this reader sometimes wasn’t exactly certain what was going on.
Overall, the book is dramatic, humorous, and makes you stop to ponder the same questions troubling Izzy—what are we all doing here?
–TC Brown
Books in Review II 