The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis

What was inside Buddy was like stars connected by strings of light, a chain of stars, strings linking star to star to star, and not just in there but the strings were everywhere, in her arms, for example, and a whole lot of them strung to the star at the back of Buddy's nose. The closer she got, the more densely knitted it all was and also clumped with debris, dark clots of stinking matter, buzzing like bees and restless, fidgeting around, bumping themselves into place and taking up all the room. A smell like what came from the sanitary-napkin disposal boxes in the school bathroom and also, weirdly, banana skins.

Three young girls, living in a New England town on the Canadian border, come across a dead body. It's their neighbor, Carl Banner. Two of them head off to alert the authorities, but one stays behind, Mees Kipp, to use a power she's kept secret for many years: she brings Mr. Banner back to life.

There's no reason that it should be Mees that has this power. She's an ordinary child, and kind of a shit, prone to resentment and antisocial behavior. But it's Mees that brings Carl Banner back to life, and later, her friend's dog Buddy, who's been shot by a neighbor for attacking her chickens, and then, much later, a drug-addled criminal who wants to rob the church collection plate. Why is it Mees, of all people, who is visited by Jesus in the woods? Who can see into the stuff of life, "like stars connected by strings of light?" It's no coincidence that the novel's climax--that church robbery--takes place on the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples in the form of tongues of flame. The disciples were nobody special; they hadn't earned the gift of God's powers. Such gifts are given of God's free will, and He's accountable to no one for whom he gives them to.

I feel like I've been chasing the high of Davis' first novel Labrador for many years. This is the fourth of her books I've read, after The Walking Tour and Versailles, and I'm beginning to see how Davis is interested in the way the strangeness of the religious and the metaphysical erupts into the ordinary. In that way, The Thin Place is the most like Labrador; Mees' gift, the mercurial visits from Jesus, the recycling of Biblical language, all have their analog in the angel Rogni who attends on the protagonist in Labrador. And when Davis is in her metaphysical-religious mode, man, this book really hums: "Life has nowhere to move," she writes, "being everywhere, doesn't move though it's always in motion, is the leaf is the trash is the girl's pierced navel the worm the cat's paw the lengthening shadows." Or, talking about birdsong and sounding like Joy Williams (who will always be linked to Davis in my mind perhaps mostly for having read them at similar times): "Theirs is a kind of music that lightens the human heart, and there is no telling what we'll do to one another when it finally stops." Or this:

The world was strange from day one. Let there be light, God said, and there was light. There is probably nothing more beautiful and implausible than the world, nothing that makes less sense, the gray bud of the willow, silky and soft, the silk-white throat of the cobra, the wish of nature or humans to subsume all living matter in fire and flood. I will hurt you, hurt you, hurt you, says the world, and then a meadow arches its back and golden pollen sprays forth.

But the brilliance of Labrador was not just in this mode, but in the powerful singularity of the ordinary scene: the intense jealousy and admiration the narrator has toward her beloved sister. The Thin Place, by contrast, spreads everything around, trying to capture a couple dozen main characters. I couldn't make myself interested in Carl Banner, or the middle-aged womanizer Piet, or the bourgeois Crocketts, or hapless Billie Carpenter, or the Episcopal Priest, or the book binder who ends up in a coma. Davis even gives us point of view chapters from dogs, cats, and beavers! The point is, these too, are life, and are part of the interconnectedness of things; Mees' gift is only a slight interruption in great geologic churning of life that includes deer and fisher-cats and butterflies and lichen. It's often powerful and powerfully written, but sometimes reading The Thin Place I felt as if I'd rather be hearing about the lichen.