Whenever I’m approached by a salesman for some brand of evangelical Protestantism, I’m always amazed when he or she expresses the unknowable and ineffable nature of God and then proceeds to tell me just what God is thinking. Take, for example, the notion that the Lord really wants me to vote Republican. This seems incredible to me a.) because I can’t imagine that He makes those kind of distinctions, and b.) even if He did, the Gospels tell us that back when He was Jesus He was most definitely a liberal. (I can discuss this here - the Bible’s a book. Good one, too. Highly recommended.)

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To the Point: Where I’m going with this is that there is a platitude, suitable for framing, concerning crises of faith: “God answers all prayers; sometimes the answer is no.” It’s meant to rationalize our belief in a God who remains concerned with our well-being even as we’re getting screwed by life. Personally I prefer to give God his props for having a more complex process than that. The fact is that fairy tales, Walt Disney and Creflo Dollar aside, most of us will never, never see our dreams come true. Our innate nobility, our heroism, our grace is that we know this and continue to carry on.

Brendan Short’s debut novel Dream City (MacAdam/Cage, 2008) is about carrying on in the face of dashed hopes and unfulfilled aspirations. It’s about lifetimes spent staring into the abyss and our daily decision to step back from the edge or jump in. It’s about the most depressing book I’ve read in a very long time, and one of the most impressive first novels I’ve ever encountered.

The novel begins in Depression-era Chicago, where Michael Halligan lives with his father Paddy, an ex-pug turned legbreaker for the Irish mob, and his mother Elizabeth, chafing at the trap her life has become. When Elizabeth dies from an ugly, bloody mishap, Michael is left in Paddy’s care and exposed to his world of bars, B-girls and crime. His only solace, to which he clings with the fervor of a drowning man, is his collection of Big Little Books, those thick, square volumes of pulp adventure and recycled comics that many people of my age or older may remember. Collecting “Big Littles” becomes Michael’s driving obsession, a lifeline to his happy childhood while his adolescence and adult life continue to, well, suck. After Paddy discovers that Michael is skimming off the top of the numbers money Paddy collects for his boss, Paddy throws his son out into the street. Always good with numbers, Michael becomes an accountant, a ’50s Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. He meets a girl and marries her, and they have what, according to the American Dream, is supposed to be happiness. The problem is that, unless it comes in a cheap, boxy paperback, Michael has no idea what happiness is. He has rage and lust and all the spiky and flaring emotions in the human palette, but his early life has left him nigh-sociopathic, and his tragedies beget more tragedies.

Faring no better are the people moving in and out of Michael’s life. Short gives us glimpses into the fortunes of Paddy, whose big-time ambitions are continually thwarted by his small-time intellect; of Michael’s aunt, an aging perfume-counter girl caught between her attraction to other women and her crippling Catholic guilt; of Oswald Knoll, the boxer who ended Paddy’s career back in the day and went on to become the pitchman for Whitman’s Big Little Books, watching helplessly as his ideals of heroism are trampled by the cynical march of the 20th century and in his own failures as a father; and Sara, Michael’s wife, who hangs on as long as she can as her love is drained by the emotional black hole inside her husband.

Like I said, not a happy book - there’s enough alienation, despair and pathos here for three Bergman films - but a beautiful book nonetheless. Short’s writing is evocative, from the sights and wonders of the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair to the stinking back alleys where Paddy does his work to the almost pornographic detail Short lavishes upon the objects of Michael’s obsession. Every scene in the book’s impressive span, 72 years all told, has an immediacy to it that draws the reader in completely. Just as urgent is Short’s gift for characterization, his ability to make us feel his players’ pain as it happens again and again. It’s a harrowing novel and brilliant for it. Other critics have compared Short favorably to Michael Chabon, and I can’t disagree.

This is not to say there is no redemption in the novel. There is, and it comes at just the right time, but it’s a long and thorny hike to get there. This may seem like a negative, but it’s really not. Dream City does exactly what the best novels are supposed to do, change the reader in a way he or she never expected. The best dreams are like that, too.

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Yet Another Memoriam: One of our greatest American dreamers passed away on Jan. 27. John Updike, prolific man of elegant letters and bold humanity, died of lung cancer in his home in Massachusetts. Updike was a writer’s writer, insightful and eloquent, never content to rest on his laurels, no matter how prestigious those laurels may have been (he won the Pulitzer Prize twice). I first discovered Updike in his remarkable 1963 novel The Centaur and revisited him often, lingering over his novels about the crass and flawed but complex car dealer named “Rabbit” Angstrom, in Rabbit, Run and its sequels. Those who don’t know Updike at least know The Witches of Eastwick from the film version with Jack Nicholson; the sequel to that delightful book just hit the shelves last month, and his final book, My Father’s Tears and Other Stories, is due out this summer. Really, it should be enough to simply say “John Updike has died” and let the nation’s mourning ensue - go find any of his novels, his stories, or his essays and you’ll see why he will be sorely, sorely missed.

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Items Over the Wire: The University of Georgia Libraries have announced this year’s selection for the Georgia Writers’ Hall of Fame, and the headliner is local poet and professor Coleman Barks. Barks taught at UGA when I was a student during the Pleistocene Era and was already raking in the accolades for his excellent original work, but as an explicator of the 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi, Barks became a freakin’ rock star. As anyone who has read a bad translation of Dante or Homer can attest, the translation of poetry, particularly across the span of centuries, requires the consummate skill of another poet. It’s not like working at the UN - the beauty and intricacies of the original don’t always translate well into English, which is often the most hamfisted of languages. For Rumi’s mysticism and lyricism to come across the way they do in Barks’ work is a testament to the poet’s skill, and Coleman Barks deserves all the props he gets.

The other living winner (Hall of Fame honors go to two living and two deceased writers every year) is former Georgia poet laureate David Bottoms, while the posthumous awards go to Robert Burch, the author of several books for young people, and novelist Raymond Andrews. How Andrews, the author of such amazing novels as Apalachee Red and Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee is only now being given this honor is beyond me - maybe it’s a rules thing - but he was a writer with genuine soul, and anyone aspiring to write real Southern fiction would do well to see what Andrews did in his (tragically) few books.

And while we’re on the subject of what local writers can teach us, this item came across my desk: “Terry Kay - The Anatomy of a Novel - Workshop on Writing, hosted by Oconee Cultural Arts Foundation Mar. 21–22. This workshop will be conducted in three two-hour sessions… Fundamental writing techniques - including outlining, rhythm, character development and self-editing - will be emphasized. The workshop fee is $100. Advance registration is recommended as space is limited. For more information, call 706-769-4565 or email info@ocaf.com.”

Writing lessons from Terry Kay, author of To Dance with the White Dog and the recent The Book of Marie, among many others, and one of the reasons Athens rocks so frigging hard. Go. Learn. Make more good writing for the rest of us.

John G. Nettles