It has become a commonplace in recent years to lament the lack of emotional depth and variety of subject matter in contemporary American fiction. One of the catalysts for this discussion, and perhaps its most eloquent instance, was a now-famous essay by writer Tom Wolfe that appeared in Harper's magazine in 1989, entitled, "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast." After singling out the schools of metafiction and minimalism as the major sources of the problem, Wolfe resoundingly calls for a return to the realist novel of the nineteenth century with its epic scope of events and ideas, which in his view is exemplified by his own novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. Along the way, Wolfe approvingly cites Sinclair Lewis who, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "called on his fellow writers to give America 'a literature worthy of her vastness.' "

Wolfe rather narrowly assumes that such a return to the realistic novel entails using the "tools of journalism" to study the city, the seat of contemporary culture. But one might just as easily fulfill Wolfe's call by borrowing the tools of the historian to examine a rich and neglected vein of America's rural past. That is precisely what native Oklahoman Rilla Askew has done in her stunningly beautiful first novel, The Mercy Seat.

The story of the Lodi family's sudden and unexpected migration in 1887 from Kentucky into Indian Territory encompasses the social panorama of western settlement, the particularities of which Askew renders in as loving detail as Wolfe could hope for. We come to know the interiors of cabins, wagons, and small-town general stores; we hear the staccato rhythms of western dialect and read Christian Scripture in its Choctaw translation. There are the sensual intimations that some of us even now recollect from our rural origins: the smell of sawdust and houses "thick with the smell of meat and biscuits." Finally, and arrestingly, we come to know the making of guns in all their variety, for it is the illegal manufacture and sale of patented guns that has sent brothers Fayette and John Lodi and their families on their journey to Indian Territory, on the run from the law.

The Mercy Seat, therefore, bears the mark of careful historical investigation, the process of which Askew herself has discussed. The author of one previous work of fiction, a collection of short stories entitled Strange Business, Askew found the sources of her first novel in "old stories, handed down over generations, of how my family came into Indian Territory in the late 1800's" and began the process of writing by "ask[ing] questions of the few relatives still living who had listened to the old stories."

Ultimately, though, as in any great work of fiction, it is the novel's characters that matter most, not its historical verisimilitude. Mattie Lodi is the novel's chief narrator and the center of its moral universe. At the novel's opening, on the night of the family's flight from Kentucky, Mattie awakens to the sound of her mother crying and her father's demand, "Martha Ruth! … Get up and light the fire, would you! Mama's not feeling good." Thus, within the first two pages are established the relations that will prove to be the family's undoing: the genteel mother's grief at leaving her home, the father's tendency to depend on Mattie, whom he calls "Matt," like a son, and Mattie's unceasing, yet uncomprehending vigilance. From her child's perspective, the story of their leaving becomes nothing less than the classic narrative of expulsion, and their travel by wagon westward a mythic journey, underscored by prose that has been justly described as Faulknerian. Indeed, in its cadences and trajectory, Mattie's narration recalls the stream-of-consciousness journey of Thomas Sutpen's family in Absalom, Absalom!:

In the same way that there was no sign when we left Kentucky, there was no single moment I can remember when we began to turn west, just the slow slide of sun to where it slanted left over the wagon in the daytime and hung a red ball in red sky before us at night. But it was after the sun moved and the land began to flatten and change that we started to come to the waters.

In the course of the journey, our awareness increases along with Mattie's. Slowly she becomes aware of the widening rift between her Uncle Fayette Lodi and her father, her uncle's increasing anger countered by resolute stoicism on the part of her father, the gunmaking genius. Like the feud between the brothers, the journey itself has biblical resonances. After a crossing of the Mississippi River (with farm animals) by wooden raft, and a freezing storm where hail "pelt[s] down together, jagged and frozen like shattered hell falling," Mattie realizes that "this—this—[is] the place of no turning back forever." Most tragically, Mattie observes her mother's decline and progressive heartsickness, her desperate attempts to preserve in Mattie the civilization they have left behind by reminding her that "your grandmother Mary Whitsun … was born in London, England, where the King of all English-speaking peoples lives." Even when her health and sanity have almost faded, she musters up the energy to recall, her voice "rising weak, like a halfhearted question, 'I was married … in a dress … of white linen . …?' " Then she dies.

Mattie, her father, and her siblings complete the journey, but by the time they join Uncle Fayette and family in the little Indian Territory town of Waddy Crossing, Mattie and her siblings are stricken with scarlet fever. After nearly dying herself, Mattie awakens to find her youngest sister dead and the family's last remaining possessions gone, disposed of for fear of infection. Bereft and betrayed, Mattie becomes prey to debilitating epileptic fits, healed only by the enlistment of a Choctaw (but Baptist) healer named Thula Henry. When Mattie begins to be the recipient of mysterious visions and visitations, it is Thula who must attempt to guide her to an understanding of them.

The second most fully realized and compelling character in the novel, Thula herself struggles with the tension between a Christian faith that she fervently holds and the truths of Indian spirituality she cannot help seeing incarnated in the nature around her: "[I]t was through her mother's faith that Thula understood the Holy Spirit, how the Creator and the Son and the Spirit were one," the omniscient narration carefully notes, "but it was from her father, or more truly, her father's people, that she understood the Sacred Four." Thula's attempt to help Mattie understand her gift of visions only serves to heighten the conflict in her own soul. At last, when Mattie is caught up "not in heaven or hell" but "in the other world," Thula feels so lost between white and Indian worlds that she can only pray, in Choctaw, "Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief."

Mattie's visions enable her to enter the spirits of those around her, to recall their memories. She is therefore capable of a radical compassion, a Christian virtue realized through Indian spiritual means. The novel appears to hold out the possibility of a reconciliation between white Christianity and Indian belief—not a syncretism, but a nod toward a "transcendent unity," to use philosopher Frithjof Schuon's phrase. Mattie finds the visions both exhilarating and frightening, and in the novel's most lyrical passage, she is given a culminating moment of sublime knowledge when she is able to penetrate to the heart of both human and divine Mystery, the day she is able to "see the trees bleed."

At the same time, however, the old enmity between her Uncle Fayette and her father returns. Fayette again tries to enlist John in manufacturing black-market guns, and John's persistent refusal exacerbates his rage. Filled with her own mounting resentment at the order of the universe that has allowed the death of her mother, Mattie rebuffs her mystical gift, withdrawing the possibility of compassion, and the novel bears toward its violent and inevitable end.

At this point, not only does Mattie's first-person narration cease, but the novel withdraws from Mattie's perspective entirely. We are left with a compendium of individual testimonies and commentary regarding the final tragedy, but the narration is fractured, and the perspectives contradict. Mattie recedes from the novel's magnifying eye to become a cipher, no larger than the settlers scattered through the annals of the town's events.

In the final analysis, what we have at the end of the novel is only history, without the unifying and redeeming force that grace, evidenced in Mattie's visions and Thula's love, provides. Since, biblically, "the mercy-seat" signifies the actualization on earth of God's authority, the novel reminds us that it is in the circumstances of our lives as we live them, the realm of our choices, that we are judged.

Caroline Langston's stories have appeared in The Pushcart Prize XX1, New Stories from the American South 1995, and in various journals. She is writer-in-residence at Rose Hill College.

Copyright © 1997 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.