Fat Lightning
By Howard Owen
Permanent Press, 182 pages, $22
When an aspiring writer, Nancy Chastain, comes to live in the small town of Monacan, Va., with her second husband, Sam, and their toddler son, she learns about “the three kinds of crazy that were generally recognized around Monacan”: “crazy as a bat,” “not right” and “full of meanness.” Surely Sam’s uncle, Lot Chastain, fits the last category. Angry, volatile and beset by demons, Lot inspires fear in his neighbors and a mixture of hatred and pity in his relatives. He seems the least likely candidate to be blessed with a miracle. But when sun and shadow form an image of the Crucifixion on his barn, the townspeople of Monacan-and pilgrims who journey from distant towns-have no doubt that a miracle has occurred.
In his impressive first novel, “Littlejohn,” Howard Owen uncovered the secrets that tormented his hero, an elderly man trying to make sense of the tragedy and errors of his life. How, Owen asked, do we atone for past sins? How can we find redemption? For Lot Chastain, the questions are more urgent because his sins are more lurid: incest with his youngest sister, torture of his siblings, cowardice and murder. He can kill a man as easily as he can slam a bag of kittens against a brick chimney, and with no less pleasure. He seems the perfect candidate for an epiphany, but Owen is skeptical of such simplistic paths to deliverance. Instead, in “Littlejohn” and again in “Fat Lightning,” Owen questions the process of self-transformation and the risks of self-knowledge.
By setting his tale in 1971, Owen places Lot in a particularly tumultuous age. Noisy demonstrations protesting the Vietnam War, women and blacks stridently claiming equality, college campuses igniting in riots-all these convince Lot that the end of civilization is near. Fiercely judgmental about the immorality around him, he believes that God “ought to come and rain fire and brimstone on all of us, set our fields on fire.” While he waits for the final blaze, he keeps his own fire alive: a sawdust pile burning ominously at the back of his land. And he dreams of fire: of eating the oily pine used for kindling, known as fat lightning.
For Lot, the only way to change the world is to destroy it and begin again. In the field near his barn, he begins to read Biblical passages, give extemporaneous sermons and exhort the throngs of people who come each evening to see the famed Jesus-on-the-barn.
“This here’s a sign,” he tells them, “I know it is. He’s coming to pay us back for all this wickedness, all this here free sex and burnin’ the flag and all. You think we couldn’t beat them Viet Congs if we wasn’t being punished by God?”
Lot both fascinates and repels Nancy, who tends to see everything around her-even her own marital infidelity-as material for her novel-in-progress. Indeed, his story gives her the plot for her first published book. But in unraveling the mystery of Lot’s past, Nancy also discovers a hidden layer of her own. As she finds out about his relationships with his family, she questions the viability of her marriage. As she fashions a portrait of Lot, she redraws the lines of her own identity.
In “Fat Lightning,” Owen introduces us to a wide range of quirky characters: Sam, Nancy’s husband, a taciturn pharmacist who suddenly decides to learn to slam-dunk a basketball and succeeds instead in having an affair with his high school crush; Carter, Lot’s brother, shattered by the death of his daughter and shyly tender with Nancy and her son; Buddy, Nancy’s first husband, sly and sensuous; Sebara Tatum, a flamboyant preacher who seduces Lot and precipitates his final descent into madness.
But the most complex character is Lot himself, deeply wounded, longing for salvation and doomed to self-destruction. Once again, Owen has given us a modest, understated novel informed by a profound theme: the quest for emancipation from the nightmare of one’s own history.
