PREVIEW: Blue Walls Falling Down

A novel that chronicles questions beyond our ability to answer

This excerpt is a Preview, an occasional feature at Current and a companion to our Review features. In Previews we publish short excerpts from new and upcoming books that tell a good story and fit our general mission of commentary, reflection, judgment. This selection has been adapted with permission from the publisher from the novel Blue Walls Falling Down by Joshua Hren. Angelico Press, 2024. 436 pp., $22.95

***

Stella Tęsknota was ready to marry Blake Yourrick, the troubled if earnest protagonist of Infinite Regress. In this stand-alone novel (and loose sequel), set after Blake abruptly—and inexplicably—breaks off their engagement, Stella throws herself into a tough South Chicago teaching assignment. There she meets Peter Clavier, a psychologist-activist whose uncle—a pastor—has long prophesied for Peter a future of otherworldly greatness. 

Written with a style and sensibility that have been compared to David Foster Wallace and Dostoevsky, James Joyce and Saul Bellow, Blue Walls Falling Down follows Stella as she draws out Peter’s past. The story traces Peter’s trajectory from a Cabrini-Green childhood to surreal stardom in the orbit of underwritten radical politics.

In this section Peter is campaigning to become alderman, after swearing he would leave politics behind.

***

When Peter was running like mad for alderman he led a whole block—fifty-some people—down Bond Avenue on a sleepy Sunday night. He rallied the cussing, fussing neighbors—dispirited, like a troop of the dead—to rise against the “tragic accident,” decrying the very term “accident—as if there is no intentionality in omission, in negligence, in the recklessness that claims lives daily,” decrying too the “dead-on-arrival description of ‘tragic death,’ it’s a soporific, it’s a prepared formula like a pharmacy prescription to fool us into feeling, finally—or failing to feel, as it’s a pain killer—failing to fail, as if all that goes down goes down in spite of our goodness, as if nothing could have been done to prevent it!” Hearing his tenacious tone Stella Tęsknota kept her thoughts on tragedy to herself. Like a walking lightning rod waiting to be struck, Peter roused them from their lightless houses, sunken porches, to “cook from the furnace of our wretched race souls that rise up when we’d rather melt down.”

Throwing his arms and pointing his fingers, twirling and twisting in every direction, he bid them build from the scraps of the accident a makeshift traffic circle, crying out, “We cannot wait for the state to do us justice! Holy Mother State is unseeing the actualities of our existences! We must scrape some semblance of justice from our wreckage, like gleaners looking for silver lining in the gutters, in landfills! If justice means starting with traffic circles made from trash—so be it! Amen?” Little children and elderly men, middle-aged women with stoops in their steps, dragged out the overflowing garbage cans Sanitation had started neglecting when walking the neighborhood was knee-jerk fatal. Even the evening before, after the unknown fool hit Miss Beatrice and ran his wheels at highway speed down the narrow dark night’s street, the police had taken an hour to arrive, and by the time the ambulance came the woman who had been walking home from the corner grocer’s with a can of cooking oil had become—“how to say it, a rigorous corpse, the commission of omission, the awful emblem of our condition.” Peter’s soles scraped against a board, a plank sharp-angled into the sky, and he pulled out the nails that threatened to puncture his rubber soles as he ascended, balancing on a crossing of boards, discarded wood and a piece of the hood, a rearview mirror he kicked lightly to the left where it crashed, shattered in the street, though he fast recovered his tentative poise, stealing a smile, showing his teeth. 

The neighbors who had gathered tilted their heads as he stared down a Chevy headed straight for him. Half the street lamps blinked. Peter, arms akimbo, did not. The car played chicken but swerved. Staring, as if looking for that young man who’d gone to bed last night for the first time in his life lacking a mother, her as-if-always-there snoring filling the dark room down the hall, lacking the cornmeal chicken she was planning for Sunday brunch after church, lacking her laughter and her temper as she threw (as she was known to) a pot (or two) at his head when he came home after curfew. Stella followed his eyes and found the boy’s shadow cast across Miss Beatrice’s big porch—the blue boards Peter had helped paint, lit by a security light. Peter climbed the pole the hit-and-run had ricocheted into, the propped-up, decapitated stop sign, the sign the pastor had dragged to the center and squeezed between stuffed green trash cans. Suspended there like a crazed crossing guard, he held his arms out scarecrow fashion, halting traffic with a resigned stare that scared some of the kids to the sidelines, a stare that looked quite close to despair but which she knew was not his blues but rather the strange sleep of his face which hid his will when he steeled it, when he stole inhuman strength as if from nothing. 

Satisfied, shaking hands, brushing bits of trash from their bodies, the crowd dissipated into the night. Peter stood there, unmoved, stubborn, staring through the passing cars’ headlights beyond his eyes blinking against the stellar light shed from impossible distances that existed, not infinite in fact but feigning a level of measure that defied the mind, the spaces between the cars and the stars, the distance uncrossed by any man, his gaze widened, eerily bold, refusing to blink at what we had made, at what it had come to, the spaces between the stars and the cars, his vision narrowed until the stare she saw there scared her, for it came from someone beyond recognition, a host of fury who fought the world single-handed in the Chicago night, valiant amidst so much violence, yes, but unable to save himself, his crossing-guard arms stretched all the way out as if to say take me, here I am, take me, until she risked traffic and ran right to him and pulled at his pant leg, pleading with Peter to please come down. Come down. Come home. He refused to look down. 

She had walked, alone, to that place she called home, a stranger in someone else’s kitchen, doing dishes with the watered-down detergent, the garish blue neon sinking to the bottom and exploding suds from the scalding water, her fingers scrubbing from the week-old dishes a desperate effort to domesticate the untallied distance that hid her from him. Wringing filthy refuse from the sponge—burnt bread crust forgotten in the toaster, set afire until Peter blew it out, turned into infinitesimal crumbs, ocean-cast driftwood that over the decades breaks down, finally, into scattered specks of wet dust—she was not rid of her soaked-up anger. As she watched her furrowed face in the water, a flash of sweat wetted her forehead and she grasped, frantic, the kitchen garbage, throwing up her insides until only bile and then nothing could be retched from her hurting bowels, from miles of convoluted intestines emptied and throbbing all the miles she had walked with him, hurting the soles of her feet, itching and hot, and then a fevered forehead burning her memories until what she’d done was a welcome blur—as if it could not define her future. She let out a sequence of staccato screams, felt the swell of the fledgling baby whose father she sensed could be dead any day. With a wet dishtowel tossed over her shoulder she took the garbage out to the rusted green waste bin like the dutiful spouse she could no longer play. 

Joshua Hren is founder and editor of Wiseblood Books and co-founder of the MFA at the University of St. Thomas. He is the author of ten books, including the theological-aesthetical manifesto Contemplative Realism and the novel Blue Walls Falling Down.