There seems to be some strain of Calvinism, that dichotomy between the damned and the elect, underlying the greatest feats of self-delusion in this country. The average conspiracy nut who shows up at the public library to fax his latest manifesto to Congress certainly believes himself a member of the elect, able to recognize reality for the lie it is, while his neighbors are among the damned, so much wheat ripening for an alien harvest. In political rhetoric, the label of “un-American” is used to signify someone else’s status outside the national ecclesia, where there is no possibility for salvation. But this Calvinism can extend even to genetics. As W. J. Cash pointed out in The Mind of the South (1941), as soon as Southern, white slaveowners accrued enough money and status, they began recruiting ancestors from the noble cavaliers of France so as to distinguish themselves from their racially ambiguous “white trash” kinfolk, for elect status could only be assured through a lineage that excluded all possibility of blackness; and soon enough, families readily accepted the lies their progenitors had crafted. In other words, our ever-American readiness to draw firm lines between the hellbound and the heavenbound offers near endless possibilities for self-deception.
Matt Baker picks up this theme and runs with it in his debut novel, Drag the Darkness Down, which tells the story of Odom Shiloh—the assistant to the assistant football coach in the small Delta town of Frothmouth, Arkansas—and his search for his piano virtuoso sister Bridget (affectionately called Birdshit), who has recently skipped town with the school’s football star. Odom is aided in this quest by family friend Blakey Flake, who is ostensibly a private detective with a master’s degree in art history and an army of undercover assistants at his beck and call, though the pair spend the first two chapters chasing spurious leads down to Louisiana because no one thought to dial up Birdshit’s cell phone and ask where she was. As Odom and Blakey follow Birdshit’s trail back to Little Rock and then to Kansas, it is also revealed that Odom is also a fugitive from justice, having, just before the opening chapter, accidentally run over a French cyclist in Memphis, Tennessee.
But there is more going on than this. Blakey might complain about crazy street preachers “grandstanding about divisive belief systems that damn outsiders and offer guarantees only for those who belong,” insisting that “anyone with a dozen or more synapses firing in their skull knows there are no shortcuts, life offers no easy paths, except for a very few of us.” However, Odom is one of those whom life affords shortcuts, being a member of the secretive Shiloh Foundation, a family-run, Illuminati-type organization that dictates the direction of world commerce and politics from the shadows of Frothmouth—the invisible hand, complete with Masonic-like initiation ceremonies that take place out in the remote Arkansas woods. According to Odom, Blakey works for the Shiloh Foundation, and his Uncle Lou oversees his own related operations from his headquarters in a Kansas City barbeque joint, in the basement of which there take place the occasional acts of torture and interrogation. Odom knows all of this because his father filled him in on his inheritance before mysteriously disappearing in the wake of some federal investigation.
Odom’s inability to contrast objectively his own grand assertions about his inheritance and his actual situation—as the assistant to the assistant football coach, on the run from the law, paired with a chain-smoking PI who has his own delusions of grandeur—recalls William Faulkner’s Emily Grierson, defining her station in life by the standard of her ancestors, imagining for herself a life filled with love and adoration even as she rests each night next to a corpse. But there is also a great deal of humor in Baker’s novel, which recalls Lamar Jimmerson and the Gnomon Society from Charles Portis’s comic Masters of Atlantis (1985), its main characters strutting about grandly at the banal fringes of society even though they supposedly possess the ultimate secrets of the universe. (That said, perhaps Odom’s belief that a barbeque shack is one of this secretive foundation’s centers of operation simply reflects his Arkansas origins—after all, political deals in Little Rock are regularly struck at local steakhouse and burger joint Doe’s Eat Place.)
Odom’s Shiloh Foundation, however, has a far more tragic origin than the Gnomon Society, an origin that forces the reader to renew again that old debate about free will versus determinism—for who needs an invisible hand guiding the course of the universe when all it takes is one act of evil to break a person’s spirit and consign him to live in a world of illusions, never able to extricate himself from years upon years of lies? Odom himself admits that “the most powerful forces in the universe are those closest and most familiar,” and he later recalls his father’s words to the effect that “the biggest confusion we all suffer from is this inability to discern the real world from the one we create in our heads.” Consciously knowing this, however, has no effect upon his own confusion, and neither can repeated revelations of truth throughout the novel move him any closer to reality; in fact, as the reader learns at the end, he has gone down this road before and returned unchanged, and he will again.
And maybe this is what Matt Baker is trying to tell us—the mere act of drawing that line between the damned and the saved puts you on the wrong side of it. Or perhaps only the deranged think in terms of such a line. Drag the Darkness Down might, at first blush, appear like a buddy narrative (albeit one tinged with southern sense of the absurd), the road trip story wherein things go awry and friends learn a lot about themselves and each other, with the journey eventually achieving greater import than the destination. The author riffs on this form with skill, populating his novel with the array of second-rate eccentrics one might expect and putting snappy but profound words in their mouths. But embedded in this is an intricate meditation upon the limits of human self-awareness, the limits of salvation, which makes each character all the more real, so that they haunt the imagination long after the book has been closed. “Human beings are pretenders,” says Blakey to Odom. “We have not yet achieved our true essence, so we pretend.” We even pretend we can discover the truth.
