My friend, the talented writer Chad Holley, just had his first book published, a novel called Shield the Joyous. I love this book. I read it twice! I've written the review below in hopes you might enjoy it, too.
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In Chad Holley's debut novel, Shield the Joyous (Bull City Books, November 2024), the first-person narrator, Michael Haley, guides us through an unusual day when he was twelve, roaming a 1980s rural Mississippi neighborhood with his pals.
At the most basic level, Holley’s novel is an unvarnished portrait of boyhood. It shows a masterful grasp of boy-language and boy-psychology, especially the risky, hilarious "logic" that propels boys through boyhood (or, at least, propelled me through mine).
Early in the novel, Michael is outside playing with his friend Zeke Barry, younger brother of Wendy Barry, Michael's girlfriend, who has shut herself in her bedroom and refuses to see him. The boys discover a used can of black spray paint, empty it, and single-mindedly set about trying to liberate the little ball rattling inside the can.
"What did it look like? How big was it? What was it made of? How did they get it in there? And how come you never heard anybody talk about them? I mean, they were sort of an obvious thing, weren't they, all the millions of cans of spray paint out there and a little secret ball of some kind clattering around in every one?" (p. 15)
When slamming the can against tree trunks fails to deliver up the ball, the boys take an axe from the tool shed. Michael kneels and holds the can steady on the chop stump, placing his chin on the edge for a good view, and Zeke brings the axe down, hacking the can in two—to the reader's relief, there remains only one stump in the scene—covering both boys with black paint: "For an empty paint can, this one sure had a lot yet to offer" (p. 16).
Episcopalian Beauty
Underneath the hilarity, scenes like these—which fill the novel—suggest something subtler: children live in the present to an extent that eludes most adults. Whether Michael and his friends are splitting open paint cans, shooting squirrels, or amassing an arsenal of snowballs, they are “fully absorbed” (p. 85), and "the activity seems to choose them" (pp. 14-15). They have no concern for past or future, no thought of larger purpose or ambition, and no disappointment when their actions accomplish little; “without marking the time” (p. 86), the boys simply are, and they simply do.
At times, the result is wondrous. In one scene, Michael wanders alone up the creek that winds through his neighborhood and meets the mysterious town recluse, whom the kids have dubbed "Ol' Cletus." After a cryptic conversation, they stand together, silent, taking in the beauty of the creek:
Just then a breath of fresh breeze rose, stirring the thick paper leaves of the cottonwood, and from among the leaves came a fairy stream of eiderdown, so many white wisps drifting dreamily over the water, through our little private theater of broken sunlight (p. 66).
For the reader, time stands still (the language!). These moments of aesthetic wonder are not mere ornaments in Holley's novel. Rather, appreciation of beauty is the engine of the story, driving Michael's transformation. Michael, Zeke, and their friend John Dixon—an undersized fishing savant with adenoids—stumble on a time capsule containing a message from Ol' Cletus. The message is a piece of compline poetry from the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer:
Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake.
Michael's family is Presbyterian, so earlier in the story, we learn he’s wary of Episcopalian faith, the “aesthetically bewitched cousin in the family of Christendom” that employs in its prayer book “a great deal of language I distrusted as extra-Biblical” (p. 105-106). Yet Michael is attracted to the only Episcopalians in the neighborhood, the Petersons, rare “good people” who exude a puzzling joy and an uncommon care for their neighbors (pp. 98-106).
The beautiful compline prayer grips Michael and moves him to visit Mr. Melancon, father of Will Melancon, one of Michael's pals. The fathers of both boys fought in the Vietnam War, and while Michael's father is “glad he went” (p. 135), the unstable Mr. Melancon was traumatized by his service. As Michael goes up the hill to the dilapidated Melancon house, we get hints that Will has died; we learn later that he became a soldier and was killed in Afghanistan. Michael has come to visit Mr. Melancon, to "pity the afflicted," to "soothe the suffering."
Time and Self-Knowledge
How would a twelve-year-old boy have the maturity to comfort a diminutive yet terrifying man like Mr. Melancon, even granting the aesthetic power of the compline prayer? And how can Will have already died in combat if Michael is twelve and Will is the same age? Answer: When Michael ascends the hill to the Melancons', he is no longer twelve.
Here we probe another deep theme of the novel: time. The novel's events occur over a day, yet as the story unfolds, Michael and his friends live through all four seasons. They begin in a Mississippi summer, “thrumming with bugs and heat” (p. 14), progress quickly to autumn, where “all around us, throughout the neighborhood, yellow and red and purple leaves were raining from the trees” (p. 21), and by the end of the first chapter, the trees are "naked," snow is falling, and winter has come. When Michael starts up the hill to the Melancons’, the snow has melted, and spring has sprung.
The blended, compressed timeline leaves the reader in a kind of eternal present where time is irrelevant, and the quest is not for the end of a linear story (though the novel does tell a linear story, of a sort) but for answers to life's persistent, intractable questions. For example, can we ever know ourselves?
For Michael, the answer is, "Sort of. Not really" (p. 65). Perhaps we can partially know ourselves through the eyes of others. When Mr. Melancon asks Michael, "What is it you're afraid of?" (p. 156), though Michael can't answer the question, he accepts Mr. Melancon’s premise: he discovers he is afraid.
The encounter with Mr. Melancon goes some way toward curing that fear. Michael emerges from the Melancons’ house with new courage, determined to talk to his sequestered girlfriend, Wendy. She, too, gives Michael a glimpse of himself when he finally confronts her through the cracked-open door of her bedroom:
"I noticed a slow, meaningful grin creep into Wendy's face, and the way she looked at me changed. I felt myself flushing. She had never looked at me like this. Nobody had ever looked at me like this. How was she looking at me? I would say it was like she had just this moment noticed me, only it was better than that. It was more like we both had just this moment noticed me." (p. 193)
It takes the perspective of other people for Michael to begin to see himself.
But what about our distant-future selves? Or our long-past selves? Can we understand the story of our lives? The novel reminded me of a paper by Derek Parfit, "Later Selves and Moral Principles," in which Parfit suggests that personal identity admits of degrees. Being the same person over time, says Parfit, may be a matter of certain mental connections, such as memories that connect us to our life experiences. Over time, as those mental connections weaken, as we forget our experiences in whole or in part, we become different people, at least to some degree.
Throughout the novel, the narrator, Michael, looks backward from an older age, scouring his childhood for a coherent story. Similarly (and speaking vaguely to avoid spoiling), it seems young Michael strains to understand his older, adult self. Old and young Michael, two different people, strangely inhabit the story together, looking to each other for understanding—old Michael searching the tenuous threads of memory, young Michael equipped only with intuition and imagination. They have questions for each other (p. 196)—questions that, as the title of the last chapter implies (“Ars Longa, Dies Brevis”), take more than a lifetime to answer.
Shield the Joyous
Who are "the joyous" in Holley's novel? The Petersons and their aesthetically suspect Episcopalianism are candidates. In Mrs. Peterson, Michael sees a mother at ease sledding with her children on a snowy day. Michael’s mother describes Mrs. Peterson as “Not Right” (p. 101), but to Michael, she just seems happy (pp. 100, 103).
Mr. Peterson exudes good cheer, honesty, and earnest love of neighbor; he's a man “un-subject to the fear that makes others of us ignore things, like people and their pain” (p. 105). The Petersons seem to embrace the beauty, wonder, and joy of life that young Michael detects, but for which he lacks categories.
Nevertheless, Michael and his neighborhood pals strike me as the best candidates for "the joyous." Their hijinks exude a full-throated embrace of life that left me chuckling throughout the novel. More profoundly, Michael's encounters with the beauty of nature are soaked in emotion best described as "joy.”
After Michael and Zeke crucify an already-dead possum, nailing it to a fallen oak tree—“an uncommonly old possum,” a possum about which there is so much Michael wants to say that his “heart aches with the effort” (p. 18)—Michael prays:
'God, all creation is the work of Your hands and reflects Your glory. Everything is beautiful, and everything is miraculous, and we are out in the middle of it, and it feels like we will never die...We are overwhelmed with joy.' (pp. 26-27)
But darkness threatens these joyful boys: Will Melancon has, of course, died, and by the end of the novel, we learn that the Petersons’ oldest son was killed in a car accident while returning from college.
In this earthly life, sooner or later, we all become weary, we all fall sick, we’re all afflicted, we all weep, we all suffer, we all die. And yet, insists Holley's novel, joy remains: in the rich ferment of memory and experience that blends childhood with adulthood, there is still the wonder of a purling creek, drifting cottonwood seeds, tennis-ball-yellow goldfinches enveloping a backyard, and the tinkling of windblown treetop ice like a winter palace chandelier.
Like the compline prayer, Shield the Joyous strikes me as a kind of petition—a narrative plea that we would notice the wonder of creation, that we would embrace the complicated and sometimes painful beauty of our lives, and that the Creator would shelter the guttering flames of our joy.
