The Wake of Forgiveness

Old Jules and East of Eden meet William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy.

Czech family ten­sions in rural America. Brothers and bad blood. Pulsing, metaphoric prose. Violent Texas machismo. Gen­er­a­tions of dis­trust and hate. Stirred together, this is the recipe for Bruce Machart’s The Wake of For­giveness. Alter­nating between 1895, 1910, and 1924, the story of Karel Skala unfolds abruptly, in con­fronta­tional events that explode onto the pages of this book. Born at the moment of his mother’s death, Karel, along with his three brothers, is raised by an unfor­giving father. Vaclav Skala uses the boys like plow horses, driving them in their traces and lashing them with his whip. When Karel is fifteen years old, the fragile filial rela­tion­ships explode in a mêlée of horse racing, psy­cho­logical pre­dation, and destructive fury. The fracture then elon­gates and widens as the story unfolds.

All this mayhem takes place in a poet­i­cally con­structed world, “where the sky hangs swollen and sickly above the distant horizon as if the whole mass of the heavens has been wounded and gauzed with clouds and backlit feebly by the dimin­ishing moon.” Like his note­worthy pre­de­cessors, Machart creates a fic­tional milieu that is a tan­gible element of the bloody soil it inhabits. He also creates char­acters whose atti­tudes and actions alternate between blind instinct and thoughtful finesse. “His eye is puffed up near to closed, aching still, but only as a muted throbbing deep beneath the skin. There’s some­thing to be taken from this, he thinks. Some­thing about the body, some­thing about the eyes, about the flesh and the bones and the heart. About how they want to adjust, to heal, to see and feel. And they do, he thinks, if never entirely.”

The main plot of The Wake of For­giveness is both simple and complex. Directly, it brings Karel Skala from birth to manhood. But it weaves back on itself, lay­ering past and present, then repeats itself in other people’s stories. For example, Karel’s suckling nurse later gives birth to twins, and the rela­tionship between those twins, who them­selves are respon­sible for the cat­a­clysmic climax of the novel, mirrors and reflects the rela­tion­ships between Karel and his own brothers. And Karel’s wrenching from his mother’s womb in a way recurs over and over again as he interacts with the women in his life—his lovers, his daughters, his wife. Crucial, too, is his alliance with his father, a pri­mordial con­nection that defines and later dis­gusts the man Karel becomes. Whether or not Karel can pull free from his past is the essence of his story.

When I began the book, I thought I was reading vio­lence for violence’s sake, but as I read further I realized that Machart was con­structing a much more subtle dynamic. Along with the destructive behaviors and their dreadful con­se­quences, there appear pos­si­bil­ities of redemption. “It was all the truth of the present, but he had let his awareness of it slouch back into the recesses of his mind the way the guilt stricken, in time, fold their sins into the gray creases of their con­sciousness, into the musty and neglected shadows of all that is not quite for­gotten.” Whether or not Karel can pull free from the recesses of his mind and forget the vio­lence in his soul, whether he can find redemption and hold onto its frail horizons, is what pulls the reader from page to page of this stunning work of fiction.                       –A.R.

Buy The Wake of For­giveness locally or look online at Amazon​.com, Powell’s Books, or through an IndieBound book­store.