week of 3/6/02
 
 
 

A remarkable portrait of the anger of one troubled soul
By Jeff Minick
Electric God by Catherine Ryan Hyde.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
$23 — 318 pp.

Catherine Ryan Hyde’s Electric God tells the story of Hayden Reese, a man at war with God and with things as they are.

When we first meet Hayden, he has just gotten out of jail and is working in a hardware store. As Hyde shows us more of Hayden, we realize that he is an incredibly angry man. He asks the local veterinarian, a friend, to take care of an injured possum, and then slugs the man, breaking his jaw, when he puts the possum to sleep. Hayden is sleeping with another man’s wife, a situation that soon brings a drunken Hayden to blows and to jail again. When he rescues his lover’s daughter by a different husband from her life as a prostitute, Hayden finds himself beating the young lady’s boyfriend so badly that he may never walk normally again.

Through all these acts of violence we are under the impression that Hayden is out of control because his wife and daughter died in a car crash. Then we learn that both are alive and well, that Hayden’s brooding and violent ways had led the wife who loved him to ask him to stay out of their lives. Their son had died at birth. Hayden in his anger at God smashes an expensive stained-glass window in a church. Later he commits the act — he assaults a boy who tried to take advantage of his daughter, beating him close to death — that lands him in prison.

We learn too that there are other secrets in Hayden’s past. His father is a hard, domineering man who dotes on Hayden’s younger brother, Daniel, and who says to his boys “I punish you because I love you.” Although he is supposed to keep an eye on Daniel, Hayden slips away to go on a date; Daniel, the more daring of the boys, climbs an electric tower and is electrocuted. Hayden believes that he could have prevented the accident had he gone with Daniel to climb the tower.

Hyde has given us a remarkable portrait, in Electric God, of an angry man. In her portrait of Hayden as a man, Hyde excels, writing of men better than many male writers. Not only does she make Hayden come alive on paper, she also makes other male characters — the veterinarian, the local sheriff, Hayden’s rival, the priest who talks with Hayden after the death of his son — solid and real. Although many writers have difficulty creating believable characters of the opposite sex, Hyde shows a lively capacity to create real human beings.

Electric God is also remarkable for its depiction of a man stricken by rage. By stricken here I mean afflicted, literally sick with anger; Hayden is described several times during the book as being overcome by a sort of blackness in his rage. Here he is fighting an inmate in prison:


And he couldn’t even remember, when he felt the stick strike the back of his neck, what had initially happened to start it. He just remembered looking up at the fluorescent light fixtures and being sprayed in the eyes with pepper spray, even though he wasn’t trying to get up.


Anyone who has felt such rage in his own heart and mind, a rage that literally shuts down all emotions except for a blind, dark urge to lash out and destroy, will recognize that powerful, gripping emotion in Hayden Reese.

My only complaint about this remarkable novel is that the publishers have linked it too strongly to the Book of Job in the Bible. Hyde also links Hayden to Job; Hayden’s father forced him to memorize parts of the book, and the idea of Job, of a man being tested in his faith by God, occurs many times in the novel. Hayden discusses Job with several people throughout the book.

Yet the analogy doesn’t hold up so well. Job received punishment from God as a means of testing his faith. By his acts of violence, drinking, and selfishness — after his son dies, Hayden spends 24 hours holding the tiny body in the hospital chapel, ignoring his ill wife and his small daughter — Hayden doesn’t need God to punish him; he does a fine job all by himself.

Hyde is also the author of a previous book titled Pay It Forward, a novel which, if it matches Electric God in its insights into the human heart, I shall look forward very much to reading.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)