Omensetter’ Luck
Started in 1954, published in 1966, and set in a Podunk town on the Ohio River in the 1890s, Ommensetter’s Luck sets the power of words against the power of love. The novel begins with the town gossip recounting and indexing tales — words are a major theme of the novel.
Words were superior; they maintained a superior control; they touched without your touching; they were at once the bait, the hook, the line, the pole, and the water in between.
Luckily dodging the April rains and the hazards of the mud covered roads, a preternaturally good man rolls down main street Gilead, Ohio. His ride, an uncovered wagon contains all his possessions and his family. A wide and happy man, Bracket Omensetter, finds work and a place to stay on that first drive down main. He’ll heal a man of lockjaw with a simple beet poultice and emit of aura of magic or good luck. One could think, he’s a godsend to this backwater town.
But Ommensetter’s Luck is a twisted monster story, not a hero’s tale. The gentle giant comes to town, positively impacts the townspeople, but they repulse him. Like Jesus visiting a small town in the Judean backwater, not all the people want good, some prefer the dark. Ironically Gilead, also a Judean town, means eternal happiness. One of the people Ommensetter’s good plagues is the Reverend Jethro Furber, the tormented minister of the town’s black church. His inner thoughts reveal a baser, more vulgar tormented minster than an Arthur Dimsdale, and his impotent rage depicts him as a less powerful man of the cloth than a Cotton Mather. Furber’s section, the novel’s third and final section, The Reverend Jethro Turber’s Change of Heart, comprises the last three quarters of the text, and through that text Furber becomes the star villain.
Indeed, the second quarter of the novel is Furber sitting in his church’s garden, with his inner stream of consciousness, at times projecting by talking to the gravestone of the church’s first minister. Furber’s inner stream ponders the Old Testament villains and permitted evil. The stream of consciousness, considerable lack of action, and twisted Old Testament meditation in the second quarter give the novel its difficult label, drawing it comparisons with Joyce, Faulkner, and Stein. Much like the Benji section of The Sound and The Fury, I found this section to be both difficult and unique. While I didn’t get it all, this is the memorable part of the novel — Furber talking to a gravestone, the gravestone talking back, and Furber plotting, composing, and devising his next sermon to destroy Ommensetter.
Furber is the salesman who not only believes his own pitch, but is enamored by it. In his inner stream, he holds his own rhetorical skills in the highest regard. While he takes delight in composing simple, dirty limericks like a twelve year-old, he worships his own high oratory in excelsis. He sees himself as an artist and performer, a tempter and lover:
The ladies egged him on; in Eve’s name, they dared him, so he made love with discreet verbs and light nouns, delicate conjunctions. They begged; they defied to define…define everything. They could not be scandalized — impossible they said. Indecent prepositions such as in, on, up, mere made them smile, and the roundest exclamations broken upon them like a bubble’s kiss, a butterfly’s. Smooth and creamy adjectives enabled him to lick their lips upon the crudest story. How charmingly you speak Revered Furber, how much you’ve seen of this wicked world, and how alive you are to it, they said. And with Mrs. Kinsman he had gotten to the point where, by speaking indistinctly he could…well…say anything.
Gass makes love with words, his prose is remarkable, but Furber’s thoughts are more twisted than the adulation of his words. Furber’s exquisite prose describes his inner sordid desires and echoes Humbert Humbert:
Titillation. The wealthy ladies would come from church excited and while they slept beside their obese husbands dream of the hard distended penis of their coachman hung with jewelry. In the privacy of thought and through the secrecy of image, they would enjoy each sin his preaching suggested and through the secrecy of image, they would wallow in the worst sensations; conceive the most obscene devices; place him, their preacher, in vulgar postures; ravish him on ornate alters or on the floors of pews, urge upon in the caresses of small boys, naked under choir gowns, still moist and warm from baths.
Standing four-foot ten in one sock.
Furber’s cravings range from old wealthy women to young boys. Furber relishes pederasty more than once. One of the reasons he’s left the big city of Cleveland for Gilead is to escape these demonic drives. In Gilead, he’s less turned on by the townsfolk, but his wicked ways find a new focus in Ommensetter.
Furber hates. He blames Omensetter’s presence for his dwindling congregation, but Furber rallies back. He recovers his lost black sheep, and then once he has them, he attacks Ommenseter — through words because he can say … well… almost anything. Through the end the townspeople, ignorant of his inner thoughts, hold Furber in the highest regard while turning on Ommensetter.
A monster story or a Christ story?
Ommensetter, a blessed itinerant healer, may be a Christ pre-figure in the Old Testament way of Joseph — who’s sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers only to save them when famine strikes Israel. Those who walk in the dark despise Ommensetter’s luck like they despise Joseph’s coat. Rightly sensing evil, Ommensetter stays away from Furber’s church, preferring to observe the Sabbath by skipping rocks on river bank alongside his tight knit family. Gass doesn’t draw explicit parallels between Ommensetter and Jesus to know for sure if Ommensetter is a Christ figure, but Gass does draw a parallel for Furber with Absalom:
I have never seen the Lord God. But I have seen Absalom alive in the tree.
Furber sees his reflection in Absalom, alive in the tree, instead of Jesus dead on the cross. So in Furber we can see a lost son, a rebellious son, for Furber leads those wealthy ladies away from the Father’s kingdom, he sleeps with his father’s women. He’s an insolent child, but skilled with rhetoric.
Absalom drove David out, but David triumphed, though tragically, in the end. While we are on this earth, there’s always a chance for a change of heart, repentance, and healing. At the end Furber’s change of heart comes through words:
..when I was a little boy and learning letters — A …, B …, C …, love was never taught to me, I couldn’t spell it, the O was always missing, or the V, so I wrote love like live, or lure, or late, or law, or liar.
This admission should be read against 1 John 4: He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love, a rare New Testament citation Furber makes earlier in the novel.
The painful trope or specter of the fallen minister is too common to be shocking. How could Furber ever preach without knowing God, since he’s never known love? This is the monster’s blind spot, love. In the end love never fails, the bad guys don’t win. Ommensetter leaves, like David retreats, Joseph goes in bondage to Egypt, and Christ descends to the dead, but he leaves a profound change — as Ommensetter takes the road of out Gilead, Furber experiences his own road to Damascus.
The Old Testament way is the way of the law, words, which leads to damnation. The New Testament way is the way of the spirit, love, which leads to salvation. Yet this was reconciled, through Christ, in the beginning; in the beginning there was the word and the word is love. Ommensetter’s Luck streams the testament, still coursing today, that too many in the church choose the dark way of the Old Testament’s law and its attendant comfort, instead of embracing the change, uncertainty, and the spirit of the New. And all too often the good are cast out and left wondering.
Some of my other reviews:
A Dark Christ For A Broken Country
Heat and Light, Needful Things
