The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint
by Brady Udall
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W. W. Norton (New York): 4 June 2001. Hardcover: 423 pages. ISBN-10: 0-393-02036-3 Suggested retail price: $24.95 (US) Tags: boarding schools; drugs; hospitals; Mainstream; murder; Native Americans; orphans Tactical strength: [9/10] |
If you met Edgar Mint in real life, you probably could not prevent yourself from saying, "Oh, poor Edgar." Edgar's life sucks. His mother Gloria, an Apache on a reservation in Arizona, didn't intend to get pregnant at nineteen. His father -- a white, wanna-be cowboy -- ran hard and fast as soon as he heard about the pregnancy. Gloria turns to beer to console her grief and stays drunk the rest of her life. Many authors have used just such a background to tell rising-from-the-ashes-of-the-reservation stories, but Brady Udall adds an extra twist to Edgar's life: a Mailman runs over seven-year-old Edgar's head.
Seeing Edgar's crushed head, everyone gives up on him. Before the ambulance even arrives, Edgar's grandmother begins to mourn. Edgar's mother never even comes out of the house, and Edgar dies in the reservation ambulance. The emergency room crew doesn't even attempt to revive him, but a young doctor, Barry Pinkley, fresh out of medical school, makes the attempt and resuscitates Edgar. Edgar spends three months in a coma, gradually wakes up, and spends the next year recovering in the hospital. Edgar has a lumpy head and occasional seizures, but generally has no other health problems. In the hospital, Edgar reads voraciously, but he can never seem to get enough fine motor control to write. Finally, Edgar's roommate Art suggests giving Edgar a typewriter, and Edgar takes off filling pages and pages with words, random clacking, thoughts, and transcriptions of graffiti. (By age 13, Edgar has typed over 11,000 pages, and he keeps them all.)
Edgar cannot remember anything from before the accident, so most of his formative experiences occur in the hospital. He forms relationships with many of the hospital staff, but he chooses Art as a father figure. Art looks out for Edgar and serves as the voice of reason against the bureaucratic staff. After waking up, Edgar often falls out of bed, and the staff put Edgar in restraints. Art, in severe pain from a serious car accident, gets up, removes the restraints, and arranges pillows around Edgar. Edgar feels so happy at the hospital that later he often tries to regain the feeling of acceptance and love he felt there.
As Edgar achieves some level of happiness, outside forces always change his situation, usually in the form of Dr. Pinkley. Barry Pinkley lost his medical license because he disregarded hospital policy when he revived Edgar, but Barry feels a responsibility to give Edgar a happy life. Barry sneaks into Edgar's hospital room and tells Edgar of a plan to sneak him out of the hospital. At the same time, a social worker has arranged for Edgar's Uncle Julius to take custody of Edgar. The night Barry shows up to take Edgar away, Art attacks Barry and makes enough noise that Barry has to flee before the hospital staff can arrive to investigate. Both Edgar and Art get released from the hospital, and the state sends Edgar to the Willie Sherman boarding school, where Edgar's uncle works as a janitor.
Almost nothing goes well for Edgar at Willie Sherman. He gets beat up regularly and makes almost no friends. He finds a routine that keeps him out of the worst trouble and eventually finds some hope by joining the Mormon church. Edgar receives a blessing from the Mormon missionaries and feels the power of God flow through him. After this blessing, Edgar no longer sees the ghosts that have haunted him since he recovered from his coma. Edgar prays to learn his purpose in life, and he receives an answer: find the mailman and let him know you lived.
Edgar also learns the Mormon's have an Indian placement program that sends Native American children to live with foster families, and Barry, turned drug dealer, shows up with his promises to take Edgar away to a better place. Edgar chooses not to go with Barry, and the Mormon church places Edgar with a family in rural southern Utah. The Madsens have some marital problems caused by the infant death of their third child, but Edgar feels that he has finally found a happy home -- until Barry shows up disguised as a Mormon missionary.
Edgar starts to believe that he lives a cursed life -- that he brings destruction to anyone who comes within his circle acquaintances. His mother and grandmother die; his closest friends at Willie Sherman die or get sent to prison, and the Madsens' marriage begins to break up. Edgar feels that he must leave the Madsens to save the people that he has come to love.
Although Edgar's life seems bleak, Udall avoids generating a black despair that many modern Native American narratives produce. Edgar always maintains a level of hope. Miracles happen in Edgar's life on a regular basis, and he seems to hold out hope for the miracle that will not only save his life, but give him lasting happiness.
Although we see the despair in Edgar's life, we get pleasure from Udall's masterful descriptive abilities. If I were to drive along some narrow Arizona highway, I believe I could recognize the Willie Sherman school. Udall's descriptions go beyond the visual. You can feel the dusty desert grit surrounding the school, smell the occasional rain, and hear the chaos of the school playground. Often, Udall communicates sounds and smells by converting them into tactile sensations. His descriptions also carefully create the appropriate moods. This extract describes the school boys coming into the barn where one of the students has just committed suicide.
Inside the stable was black as a pit, and though it had not been used in fifty years, it still smelled of horse manure and rotted leather and hay. Narrow blades of moonlight knifed through the cracks and knotholes of the old wooden planks. Clumped together now we were quite a crowd -- seventy or eighty boys -- and we entered that dark space like pilgrims into a cathedral: shoulder to shoulder and so careful and quiet as to be reverent. The only sounds were our feet shuffling in the thick straw and the collective rasp of our breathing.
When Harris Neal struck a match we all flinched as if a grenade had gone off. He kicked apart a length of rotten board and lit one of the splinters, which had a thick knot at one end. The pitch in the knot sizzled and popped as the flame hissed brighter, enough to light this end of the stables with a pale orange glow. The rope from which Sterling had hung himself was frayed at the end where somebody had cut it, about seven feet above the ground. . . .
The rope went all the way up into the darkness of the rafters, tied to one of the rough-cut crossbeams. It swayed the tiniest bit, almost imperceptibly, its shadow snaking over our faces. It had been there as long as anyone could remember. All of us, even Sterling, had swung on it before, grabbed the knot and jumped from one of the supports above the door, holding tight against the pull of gravity, flying for a moment, arching out toward the opposite wall and back again. (180)
Over four hundred pages of vivid description this evocative, and powerful -- conjuring the visual images, the sounds, the smells, and the mood of the situations that make up Edgar's miracle life.
Like a game show barker, I have to say, "And that's not all." Edgar has some really weird habits and makes some strange decisions. Edgar keeps a urinal deodorizing puck as a charm against ghosts. He wants to make a bus trip to visit a friend from the Willie Sherman school, but instead of asking the Madsens for the money he steals the money, thinking that if he shows any connections to his old life that they will not want him anymore. To an outsider, Edgar's behavior would appear completely odd, but in Udall's hands, Edgar's crazy adolescent and teenage decisions make perfect sense. You identify with Edgar because you remember some of those twisted lines of childish reasoning and odd behaviors you made as child (some of which you probably still follow today).
Just so you don't think that Udall has written the perfect novel that he can never top, I do have to tell you a couple of problems. Every so often, Udall will go wild with similes to the point of distraction:
- the road shone like the bottom of a greased skillet
- his arms making tiny jerking movements as if pulled by wires
- a cosmic hiss, like the sound of solar storms brought to earth on radio waves
- [his] head wavered like the needle on a compass
- I hugged the enormous steering wheel like it was a life preserver (374)
All these from a single page of Udall's narrative. Fortunately, Udall doesn't succumb to the Steven R. Donaldson simile disease too often. Udall also switches between a first and third person narrative. In one paragraph, Edgar does the talking ("I went to the bedroom"), and in the next a narrator takes over ("Edgar went to the bedroom"). You always know that Edgar narrates the third person sections, but I could never figure out any reasoning for switching narrative modes. Perhaps Udall wanted us to keep in mind that Edgar the narrator has changed significantly from Edgar the protagonist. Every time Udall made the narrative switch, I tried to figure out his reason for choose that narrative mode, and I could never find a compelling reason -- just something that took me out of the story for a few minutes while I reread a paragraph or two.
I think almost everyone would enjoy reading The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint. But one word of caution: if you generally read fluff you should know that Edgar Mint contains graphic violence, child abuse, gore, strong language, nudity, sexual acts, forced consumption of fecal material, and drug use. All these appear within the appropriate context of the story, but they may offend some sensitive readers.
