Salvation City

Sigrid Nunez' book about post-pandemic life in the midwest mostly made me want to wash my hands. A lot. Salvation City opens its arms and hearts to Cole, a 14-year old left orphaned after the big flu pandemic hits, but the book Salvation City isn't really about the pandemic or the panic or the flu. It is more of the struggle within Cole as he tries to reconcile is atheistic, scholarly parents--now deceased-- and his own upbringing with his new-found life among evangelical Christians. Still, I recommend sitting near some hand sanitizer as you read. It'll just make you feel better.

What I loved most, besides the great writing (and the squeaky clean hands) was that Nunez' Pastor Wyatt (PW to Cole) is neither a monster nor a god. He's a human being when such a character could be ripe for caricature or parody. Nunez makes Cole himself determine his path while never forcing him to reject one way of life for the other. The people who want to adopt him are good, good people, even if PW's wife isn't really intelligent enough to truly homeschool Cole. (Yeah, home schooling doesn't come off that well). And the community itself never did fall into the looting and terror that other areas suffered. In many ways, Salvation City really is a sanctuary, in spite of its obsession with the rapture. It's easy to see in post-apocalyptic times why one would believe that the end is near. Throw in advanced climate change, news from the "outside" world as falling apart, and even the stories Cole brings from his Dickensian orphanage days. Everything is tilted on its side so that even a simple camping trip can be fraught. Danger is everywhere, but hope lies somewhere. It's no wonder there's an obsession with so-called rapture children (They mostly seem blond to me, a lay person)

Nunez skirts around the disaster that many other author's would have chosen to embrace. The world hasn't ended--there's still email, electricity (if occasionally spotty), food, community spirit, a functioning government. But she gives hints that even the best planning for a pandemic was only good for a few weeks and the glimpse of what the big cities might still be experiencing, away from the safety of a religious community shimmer in the periphery of the novel. At this point, I gave up washing my hands and hoped for the best.

And this is a hopeful rather than despairing book. It is not a particularly religious book either. It is not an us against them look at survival. There is no one way, no one true path. Instead, it's Cole's chance to come of age, instead of stagnating in the aftermath of a deadly flu. It's a book that is sadly saturated with death, but it's not the end of the world, even if the rapture-ready narrate it.