True believers
“For I am passionately in love with death.” The words of the ancient martyr St. Ignatius of Antioch keep resounding in the mind of modern-day Anna, a depressed Sunnyvale teenager in Alice LaPlante’s new novel, “Coming of Age at the End of Days,” who knows
For Anna, death means a release from the clinical depression that is destroying her life. It doesn’t help that she’s a loner, a social outcast and an only child, that she lives in a depressing suburban tract home, and that her parents just don’t get her. She also suffers from medieval-style epileptic seizures that offer mystifying, psychedelic visions.
But things change when the Goldschmidts move into the neighborhood. They are members of a religious cult that believes that the End of Days is exactly 3½ years away. On her way to school one day, Anna meets the son, Lars, and for the first time in months her spirit stirs. Lars can quote verses from the biblical Book of Revelation just as she can. He may even be able to explain her bizarre, recurring dreams of a red heifer. He invites her into the cult, and with little resistance, she joins.
Her parents, of course, are horrified, but despite being “fundamentalist secularists on jihad,” they don’t intervene. They’re just so happy that she’s motivated to get out of bed after her frightening melancholia, and they decide that this religious thing is simply a phase. They don’t seem to understand its lunatic proportions: The cult members are preparing for the Tribulation — happily explained as “years of war and chaos and suffering” — by stockpiling food and training in weapons use, all in preparation to fight the godless armies.
LaPlante gracefully sidesteps the schlocky teen romance — Anna is not the least bit attracted to Lars. She is too far gone to pursue romance. She “burns to serve” the cause, even though it will oblige her to take up arms against the unbelievers, including her parents. This concerns her, but her faith is frighteningly blind.
Her first flicker of doubt comes when she realizes that her neighbor Jim Fulson is in love with her high school chemistry teacher, Ms. Thadeous. Fulson’s love, so pure as to annihilate everything around it, makes Anna realize briefly that earthly concerns may not be so frivolous after all. Still, she remains attached to God’s plan.
Then, as if summoned, a family tragedy occurs, and overnight Anna’s world turns privately apocalyptic. Humbled by the terrible machinations of fate, she has her own revelation: She would never wish this misery on anyone, certainly not on the entire world. Abruptly, the cult’s mystique is stripped away and its hypocrisy is laid bare. Now she can no longer fight her basic nature: Stubbornly independent, she begins plotting a way to thwart the cult’s plans.
LaPlante’s prose is spare and trenchant, as if purified by fire. With very little in the way of detail, she manages to evoke the desolate vastness of the American West. Her swift plot, combined with a few stunning twists, keep the story skipping along. But in all of the hustle, LaPlante forsakes some cohesiveness, and ultimately heart. The books moves too quickly over the central work of developing character, motive and relationships, so that much of Anna’s evolution happens abruptly. We do not so much see her change as hear about it, a narrative style that at least gives the reader a glimpse into the fuzzy, disjointed world of depression but that makes it difficult to feel any compassion. Instead, the book serves as a crisp meditation on the deadly mixture of mental illness and religious charlatanism.