New Novel Explores The Mysteries Of Faith And The Loss Thereof
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Book cover courtesy of Abrams Books
(OPINION) Eli Harpo, the protagonist of Eric Schlich’s new novel, is the pubescent son of an evangelical Kentucky preacher.
Together, Eli and his dad, Simon, make the rounds of local hospices and nursing homes, proclaiming the Good News to the ailing and elderly and, if they’re lucky, selling a copy or two of a self-published book called “Heaven or Bust!”
“Heaven or Bust!” written by Simon, recounts Eli’s emergency open-heart surgery at age 4. During the operation, Eli supposedly flatlined and went to heaven, where he witnessed biblical wonders and met dead relatives he otherwise couldn’t have known about. Then he returned to tell the tale.
Eli and Simon inhabit an obscure corner of the evangelical subculture — until wheeler-dealer televangelist Charlie Gideon shows up on their doorstep proposing to create a new attraction based on “Heaven or Bust!” at his Orlando theme park, Bible World.
Simultaneously, Eli’s mother, Debbie, is dying of cancer. And Eli has begun to wrestle with doubts about his childhood journey to heaven and with his emerging sexual yearnings, which include less-than-holy dreams of a sensitive, muscular, bearded Jesus.
Spiritual and personal complications ensue, to put it mildly.
This is the plot of Schlich’s “Eli Harpo’s Adventure to the Afterlife,” published earlier this year by The Overlook Press. Although it’s Schlich’s first novel, it’s his second work of fiction, following “Quantum Convention,” a collection of stories that won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction.
Schlich, 35, teaches creative writing at the University of Memphis. A native of Lexington, Kentucky, he graduated from Lexington’s Tates Creek High School and the University of Kentucky.
Later he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Bowling Green State University and a doctorate in fiction from Florida State University.
Although he was confirmed as a Catholic, he now is an atheist.
And although he’s married to a woman, with whom he shares a toddler, he came out as bisexual in a January essay on the Literary Hub website.
“I’ve lived a straight life,” he wrote. “I’ve made straight choices.”
But he’s always felt attracted to both men and women, an internal conflict he recounted in the essay at some length, and with wit.
He is, you might say, a bisexual without portfolio.
“I might regret not being brave enough to be more sexually adventurous in my youth,” he wrote, “but I don’t regret marrying my wife — my life partner, the mother of my son, my best friend. We’ve made a wonderful life together.”
“Eli Harpo’s Adventure” toggles among several timelines: Eli’s first trip to Bible World, his years in college and his eventual return to the park with his husband and young son.
Along the journey, we get to know Simon, Eli’s dad; Eli’s mom, Debbie, who has lost her faith; the blustering Charlie Gideon; Gil Bright, a crusading atheist; and Eli’s eventual husband, Will, an aspiring documentary filmmaker.
All of them want a piece of Eli. They all, consciously or not, try to manipulate him to their own purposes.
Though Schlich comes to this tale from a different spiritual trajectory than mine — I’m a former skeptic turned Holy Roller preacher — I found myself caught up in Eli’s story. That’s partly the result of good plotting. By the end of each chapter, I had to see what would happen next.
But it’s also because I found the grace and depth Schlich allows his characters refreshing.
In an email interview, I suggested there are no real heroes in “Eli Harpo’s Adventure,” and no thoroughgoing villains. There seem to be only imperfect, often well-meaning humans who sometimes make dreadful mistakes at the expense of a 13-year-old boy.
It would have been easy and predictable to make Simon Harpo, for instance, a two-dimensional religious fanatic. Yet Simon loves Eli and genuinely believes his son saw heaven.
Similarly, Schlich could have made Gil Bright, the intellectual atheist, a secular saint. But to my reading, Bright is as self-contradictory as the rest, self-righteous in his disdain for Bible-thumpers but as willing to exploit Eli as is televangelist Charlie Gideon.
“I didn’t want to write a book with a flat villain or a book that cheaply villainizes religion,” Schlich said. “It’s not so black and white as religion equals bad and atheism equals good. Even if it’s clear which side I stand on in that debate, the characters in a work of fiction must be authentically rounded — and conflicted.”
I wish more authors, Christian or secular, were as fair-minded and insightful.
“Eli Harpo’s Adventure” entertains, but it’s also a novel of ideas, exploring questions we all should deal with but for which there aren’t clear answers. Where does faith end and self-delusion begin? How do we disagree with people we love on important matters without abandoning them? How do we parse the saints from the sinners — and which are we?
Ultimately, Eli makes his choices about the kind of life he’ll pursue and the tenets he’ll believe.
Schlich told me, “Eli gives up knowing ‘the’ answer. In the end he understands that no one can truly know if there’s an afterlife — that you have to decide for yourself and live your life based on that belief or non-belief.”
I couldn’t agree more. We make our choices and, we hope, do our best.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.