Anatomy of a Miracle

Right about the time I heard Jonathan (Johnny) Miles at Parnassus in the spring, my preacher sent an email asking for accounts of actual miracles. I expect the answers to find their way into a sermon soon.

In this novel--and rest assured, despite the subtitle (The *True Story of a Paralyzed Veteran, a Mississippi Convenience Store, A Vatican Investigation, and the Spectacular Perils of Grace) and the Afterword and Acknowledgements, the book is (as the asterisk relates) a novel--paraplegic veteran Cameron Harris, after four years in a wheelchair, stands in the parking lot of the Vietnamese owned Biz-E-Bee convenience store and walks.

His doctor Janice Lorimar-Cuevas rejects the concept of a miraculous healing but cannot find a scientific explanation. Scott T. Griffin comes from Los Angeles to create a reality television show out of the whole circus. The Vatican sends an investigator, since at least one parishioner had asked prayers of a priest one miracle short of sainthood. Social media explodes.

Without taking sides or even attempting to solve the mystery, Miles cleverly presents the tensions that  occur in the wake of Cameron's inexplicable miracle.  A man dying of cancer walks from Alabama with a blow-up crux and takes his place in the parking lot, waiting for a miracle of his own. The couple who own the convenience store, who have been reluctant to open incoming mail because of debt, find themselves doing a brisk business in relics and miracle kitsch.

Cameron's sister Tanya, who has cared for him long before his injury, when their mother died in a car wreck, long after they had been abandoned by their father, is pushed into the role of comic relief in the television series in progress. They siblings are both given new cars, new clothes, and more directing in their personal lives that they can bear.

Because the story switches points of view, the writing style also shifts. The account of Cameron's experiences in his time prior to the explosion that paralyzes him is some of the most vivid writing I've read about this particular war, rivaling some of the best writing about Vietnam, in my experience.

The section involving Dr. Lorimar-Cuevas' father, a successful writer, is another gem in the book, as he explains how story is most important.

The story takes interesting and complicated twists and turns as Cameron's character and history develop. As Miles keeps up the suggestion of a true story, he allows readers to explore all the different What if? angles that Cameron's recovery presents.

Like the characters, I'm not sure about Cameron's miracle--but I'm ready to be drawn into the conversation.

Anatomy of a Miracle

Parnassus Readings: Nothing Beats a Local Indie Bookseller

I'll admit that the local music events often fill my calendar, but almost every week, Parnassus Books in Green Hills offers another book event that's hard to pass up. This past week, I joined Gail and Premi, a couple of my book club friends, to hear New York Times book reviewer Dwight Garner interview his friend, author Jonathan Miles (Johnny to his friends and family, we learned). Miles is touring with his latest novel Anatomy of a Miracle, the story of a veteran who returns from Afghanistan a paraplegic, until one day, outside a Biloxi, Mississippi, convenient store, he inexplicably stands.  What follows is the investigation by everyone from his doctor to reality TV hosts to the Vatican.

I was familiar with Miles from his earlier novel Dear American Airlines, the tale of a man stranded at the airport while trying to reach his daughter's wedding. I did not know, however, that he's also a regular contributor to Field and Stream. He claimed that his journalism work had been a seed bed for his fiction, which fed off it. Journalism, he said, had granted an all-access pass to so much of life.

Though originally from Ohio, Miles feels he came into his own as a writer in Oxford, Mississippi, certainly a hotbed of literature. There he developed friendships with such writers as Barry Hannah and Larry Brown (in whose writing shed he worked on his fiction.)

The interview--or conversation--between Miles and Garner veered toward Miles' writing process and his journey toward novel writing. (When he married his wife, he told the audience, he was a landscaper.) He describe fiction writing as "this assemblage of fibs that somehow adds up to something true." He quoted Doctorow about the writing process: "It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way" and Russo, who said it's like throwing a pebble in to a pond--and then you have to swim around until you find your pebble.

Asked about the humor in his writing, Miles said he had been called a comic writer and wondered if he could consider it praise.  Larry Brown told him, "You never want anything in front of the word 'writer.'"

When Garner pointed out that there were some some surprises in the novel, including some intensive war writing, Miles said that one of the joys of writing is the research. He called writing a novel "this fantastic crammed eduction.  He also compared it to the worst drug in the world: 99 times out of 100 it makes you feel worse, but that one time . . . .

He discussed his writing process and answered the question about a word limit, saying he sometimes wrote zero words but other times, 8000.

Miles, when asked whether he believes in miracles, called himself a "fundamentalist agnostic." He referred to "that sense of not knowing and wanting to ask these questions and find something to believe in.  What novels do best, he said, is to ask questions, make those questions deep, put flesh on them.  After all, to be a good novelist, there's a certain level of empathy required.

"Nobody reads the same book anyway," he said. He recalled reading Reynolds' Stone Fox after losing his grandfather and crying more tears over the story than over his own loss.

I'd be willing to bet that after the Parnassus event, I wasn't the only audience member who was eager not only to go home and read but to write as well.

Parnassus Readings: Nothing Beats a Local Indie Bookseller