Greg Bottoms

He told me more about the novel: individual scenes, the terse language, the relentless delusions of the narrator/diarist, how it just gets darker and darker and more spiritually desperate until the guy presumably (it’s up for debate) kills himself because of guilt, remorse and self-loathing — and then, wham, suddenly he was babbling again about wanting to devise the first truly atheistic discourse. That was his real goal in life, he’d realized: to kill God once and for all, theoretically speaking.

I wrote the whole thing off to him fucking with me, some kind of performance. Shortly after this, however, he left school and moved back in with his parents in a Texas suburb for “rest.” Then I started reading Connell, figuring that if someone lost it reading one of his books they had to contain something, some dangerous magic, that most novels didn’t.

I begin with this anecdote because A) it was my first experience with Connell and B) I believe it illustrates — perhaps overillustrates — a truth about Connell’s work, about its perfectly controlled savagery, its relentlessly contrarian stance and its ability to flip the known world on its head, all the while almost affectlessly easing you into it. If you read Connell closely, you see that he is perhaps our most subversive writer, one who does not mistake irony or a hip knowingness about this particular cultural instant — or even a straight formal subversion of literary convention (which usually just reminds the intelligent reader of convention) — for originality. He may actually be that rarest of things: dangerous.

“Diary of a Rapist” belongs to what I would call the modern, domestic part of the extraordinarily daring, varied, brooding and original Connell oeuvre, an oeuvre filled with violence and people losing it, one that Roger Shattuck once referred to in the New York Review of Books as fiction in extremis.

Connell wrote “Diary” at the age of 40. It was his third critically acclaimed novel and his sixth book. However, at the time, despite the accolades and already having published the bestselling “Mrs. Bridge” seven years earlier, he was working as an interviewer in a San Francisco unemployment office. After spending time as a student at Dartmouth, the University of Kansas and Columbia University, then as a pilot in the Air Force, then living in Europe in the early ’50s, he settled in San Francisco to live a bachelor’s life and write full-time. He remained there for 35 years until he moved to Santa Fe, N.M., in 1989, where (having never married) he continues to reside. However, as any “full-time” writer can attest, it’s not so much the writing as the subsisting that can be tough, particularly through those long middle stretches of projects when the last check is way back in the past and the next one can’t even be seen on the horizon. Connell has always expressed a distaste for teaching and lecturing, even giving readings. So he did what the writer Hilary Masters once told me to do: Take the most mindless, insipid, mechanized, soulless job you can find; be a drone so you can save all of your energy for writing. Thus the San Francisco unemployment office in the tumultuous ’60s: drone city. The job, however, proved to be a wellspring of dark inspirations.

The narrator of “Diary,” Earl Summerfield, holds this same position as he slowly records his descent into delusion, mania, self-contempt and paranoia. It is not so much the diary of a rapist as the diary of a deteriorating soul in a chaotic, violent city in a chaotic, violent world: a person, like my old friend the theorist, increasingly unable to wring any sustainable meaning out of what he sees around him. And though it is undoubtedly the most disturbing of Connell’s early books — his longtime friend Gale Garnett called it “a gothic, worrying book”; Connell says, “People found it a very ugly book” — it is also quite representative, and not a bad one to start with, though it is perhaps more overtly transgressive than his other books and could sit on the same shelf as the novels of Celine, Genet, Henry Miller and even the contemporary works of Dennis Cooper or Bret Easton Ellis, with their assorted humpings and butcherings.

In the story “Saint Augustine’s Pigeon,” Muhlbach, a recurring character in this early work (the protagonist of two of Connell’s sadly overlooked novels, “The Connoisseur” and “Double Honeymoon,” as well as numerous stories), says, “Everywhere and always this theme recurs, spirit opposing flesh.” This describes a constant concern in Connell’s books — perhaps most notably in “Diary of a Rapist” and in the widely read novels “Mrs. Bridge” and “Mr. Bridge,” published in 1959 and ’69, respectively (later made into the 1990 Merchant-Ivory film, “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge,” starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward).

These semi-autobiographical novels — “with the emphasis on ‘semi,’” Connell has said — based on his mother and father and set in Kansas City in the ’30s and ’40s, along with “Diary” and a handful of genuinely brilliant short stories, are the best works from the early part of his career. The Bridge novels are portraits that barely resemble what one might consider conventional novels. No plot, very little actual drama, and an associative structure, with one short vignette leading to the next, some as short as a paragraph.

The novels, however, benefit from their dramatic diffusion. They are exquisite works perhaps because of this: by turns funny and harrowing, and always unexpected. Connell takes the mundane subject matter of secure, upper-middle-class folks going through nothing more than the common upheavals of everyday life in midcentury, middle America, and he shows us the characters’ longings, hopes, idiosyncrasies, hypocrisies, foolishnesses, often unexpressed love for each other, shame and so on from every angle. The novels proceed as a kind of slow stripping-away of pretense, leaving us with a sad, somewhat bleak but also delicate and moving human core. Instead of linear stories, with dramatic complication, we get stunning 360-degree portraits — like the scientific study of a specimen rendered through terse language, telling detail and episodic art. We see their lives unfold in representative moments, yet ultimately what Connell is after is the inner being of these deluded characters (whom he shows real compassion toward), how their spirits are all but crushed, without their knowing it, by their blind conformity to the world of the flesh, to institutionalized thinking.

This may sound familiar — in essence the same flaying of repressed suburban angst that fills the books of Richard Yates, John Cheever and up through Richard Ford, David Gates and A.M. Homes, to name only some of the most notable practitioners. But Connell was a trailblazer, a troubadour, one of the first to put the literary scalpel to the suburban skin, and at moments he seems as nasty as Homes without a hint of gratuitousness. And he was doing this as early as the late ’40s.

In the late ’70s he left the setting of contemporary America for the broader canvas of history, or how we got here, as opposed to where we are. In “Human, All Too Human,” Neitzsche wrote: “All philosophers have the common failing of starting out from man as he is now and thinking they can reach their goal through an analysis of him. Everything the philosopher has declared about man is, however, at bottom no more than a testimony as to the man of a very limited period of time. Lack of historical sense is the family failing of all philosophers[.]” One gets the sense that Connell has taken the tenor of this statement to heart: To truly know ourselves, we need to go back, to trace our steps.

In 1979 and 1980, he published books of historical essays, “The Long Desire” and “The White Lantern.” These books, though fascinating on an informational level, covering both known and unknown explorers and adventurers throughout the centuries, have always seemed a bit aesthetically dry to me, particularly in relation to the Bridge novels and “Diary.” It’s as if he assumed that the information was so good — and at times it was — that he should subsume his writerly voice in an act of deference to the material.

But he was just catching his stride for what will perhaps become the book for which he is best remembered, “Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn,” possibly the most unique historical essay ever published.

“Son of the Morning Star” started as an entry for a third collection of historical essays. He had written a short piece about Billy the Kid. Then he began with Custer. Before he knew it, there were 100 or more pages and stacks of information. He decided it was a book and spent the next four years researching it.

It is like nothing else written. It begins with Custer gone from sight. Then, structurally speaking, it moves forward, stops — stops — and spreads out into digression, rumination, speculation and little-known facts about the periphery of the Battle of the Little Big Horn and the main, and not so main, players. The battle is the rock tossed into the center of the pond, if you will; Connell’s interest, his genius, is to trace the circular waves of energy spreading from it. In many ways he is up to the same thing that characterized his best-known, and best, early work: railing against our blunted sensibilities, our infuriating stupidity, against America’s folly, striving for a truth, however ugly, beyond the banal and the facile.

He points out along the way that the story of the Little Big Horn, Sitting Bull and Custer is really a thousand or more little stories — Indian and white, brutal and bizarre, enigmatic and extraordinary — many of which are blatantly contradictory. Four hundred pages and a mind-boggling amount of cumulative, fascinating minutiae later, we catch up with Custer’s remains. Along the way we are treated to passages of scalpings, decapitations and castrations. Connell, obviously a bit perturbed, even indignant, with the American mythmaking apparatus, shows us the horror of battle blow-by-blow, the Indians vomiting as they scalp soldiers, the little Indian girls carrying home Custer’s favorite scout Bloody Knife’s head, “swinging it between them like a ball, each sister holding one of the dusty braids. In the village they mounted their trophy on a stick.”

“Son of the Morning Star,” a surprise bestseller and the basis for an ABC miniseries (it was rejected by several publishers before landing at the old San Francisco Northpoint Press presided over by Jack Shoemaker, longtime publisher of Connell), upset a lot of people and took a few knocks. This was 1984, after all, the dead center of the Moral Majority/Reagan ’80s. The Cold War rumbled on at its snail’s pace. Conservatives felt good about themselves and America, proud of its always moral and upright history. And here comes this crank liberal, sort of a Dee Brown or Peter Matthiessen with a mean streak, telling us that Custer probably didn’t have kids because of his gonorrhea, that he was a violator and not a hero, a narcissist hungry for fame and not a savvy warrior; making analogies between white-Indian relations and Nazi-Jewish relations, between the idiotic American selfishness and bravado of the Indian Wars and that of the Vietnam War.

Like each of his best books, though, it has aged well. Reading it now, it doesn’t seem like a liberal diatribe in the least, but rather a thoroughly researched, strange and unique panoramic view of a historical moment and its reverberations. Some reviewers, as they would a year later when Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” was published, criticized the “anti-American” sentiments, pointing out that Connell focused solely on the negative in regard to his own country. What Connell focuses on is all the stuff that had been blatantly, hegemonically, left out of previous accounts. Larry McMurtry, in the notes for his Penguin Lives biographical essay on Crazy Horse, recently said of the book: “Its topic may be Custer and the Little Bighorn, but its theme is the American character, as revealed in the struggle for the Great Plains.” That seems exactly right.

But there is such a thing as being too obscure, too contrary and concerned with minutiae, isn’t there? There is a point at which the extremes of an artist’s knowledge and interests translated into the art itself can seem insular, even hermetic. Connell has said, “I do care about readers and sales; after a book’s out, I hope it sells like gangbusters. I’m just not going to manufacture something. Once in a while I do something that corresponds to popular taste, but I don’t want to mechanically repeat myself.”

And it’s Connell’s ornery, uncompromising nature that gives him his status as literary cult hero. However, at times he has seemed to almost willfully defy readers — even readers like me who look forward to seeing what he’ll do next — to pick up his books. I’m talking about what Sven Birkets in the New York Times called, somewhat euphemistically, the “the more eccentric part of the Connell oeuvre.”

In 1962 and 1973, Connell published “Notes From a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel” and “Points for a Compass Rose” (his fourth and eighth books), two book-length poems concerned, again, with historical folly and violence. The books are not epics, but rather poetic meditations on the vast, violent history of the human race. They were his first forays into what would later become his main concerns, overlapping the more domestic/contemporary early subject matter. “Points for a Compass Rose,” the more sustained and readable of the two, is spoken by a disembodied, angry, God-like narrator who has literally seen it all. The book, even more so than “Diary” or “Son of the Morning Star,” is filled with bile, driven by it, yet is missing the broader dimensions, the depth and complexity, of those books. It is a recitation of the endless spectacle of inhumanity and the lies we tell ourselves to survive our own history, an investigation of denial on a cosmic scale. At one point, the narrator tells us — having gathered this from Talmudic scriptures — that before Adam had Eve he fondled beast. Later he guides the reader through the absurd hell of Vietnam, naming McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, Melvin Laird and Richard Nixon as perpetrators of these horrors.

Like everything Connell has done, these books are interesting, at times fascinating, filled with apocrypha and a lyric imagination, but to my mind, they’re his weakest. They seem unfocused, too angry, gratuitous in a way his other works do not. One can’t help thinking: Christ, lighten up a little. I mean, were Christians all bad? Was there not a spark of nobility anywhere, in anyone, in Vietnam? They seem more like pamphlets at times than poems, piling up one atrocity after another, without giving us the sharp, focused view — the sadness, frankly, some evidence that the consciousness at work has been effected — of the tragedies before us, which is one of the great strengths of the Bridge books, “Diary” and “Son of the Morning Star.”

In 1991 came “The Alchemyst’s Journal.” I’m not even sure what to call it. A collection of stories in the form of seven philosophical meditations by an alchemist? A novel? It’s so dense, so packed with Latinisms, period English, the medieval mind-set and voices with no sense of personality, not to mention absolutely no concrete circumstances to pin down some sort of narrative, any sort of narrative, that I couldn’t get through it again. After reading this I had concluded, alas, that Connell had to be doing some kind of private experiment to see how few readers a book might get, or to see if he could guarantee never receiving another advance from a publisher.

The good news is that with “Deus Lo Volt!,” Connell’s new novel of the Christian Crusades, he seems to have found a way to take all that is great from his early work, even the obscure work, and turn it into a devastating novel. (“The Alchemyst’s Journal” now reads like an experimental warm-up to this much more successful effort.) The book is also in many ways a perfect summation of his career, taking all the early concerns and aesthetic shape-shifting and funneling them into what may be, if we’re still allowed to use such words without undercutting their authority in the next sentence, a masterpiece.

The title comes from Pope Urban’s 11th century battle cry, meaning, “God wills it!” The book is even more historically accurate than “Son of the Morning Star” (there is no speculation). What makes it a “novel,” in fact, is only Connell’s employment of the voice of the scribe Jean de Joinville. Joinville, utterly without anachronism, tells us the story of the 200-year crusades, when Christians set out to slaughter the “heathen Muslims.” Connell keeps the narrator confined within historical and conceptual limits, which shows the sharp contrast of morality then and now. Anecdotal asides show the murder of innocent Jews along the way (written with triumphant, disturbing braggadocio), and captured knights subjected to some seriously venal cruelties, including but not limited to being covered by excrement and led around by their entrails. The book, like “Son of the Morning Star,” is drenched in blood. And it can be a bit of a hard read at first, as it moves with such violent historical sweep at a rate of about a year every two pages. Yet once you settle into it, once you realize it is like no other novel written, its remarkable and subtle intelligence is awe-inspiring.

It’s no surprise that Connell is interested in this subject. After reading the book, his career, his art, made perfect sense to me. The roots of our civilization are soaked in blood. He didn’t make that up. Connell’s just obsessed with exploring it. Earl Summerfield, Muhlbach, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, Custer, the explorers and adventurers of the essays, the alchemists and Jean de Joinville are all characters on the same time line, all sprung from the same ideological basis, for both better and worse. Connell has been on a quiet mission, as an artist, historian and, perhaps most of all, as a gloriously insidious philosopher of our true heritage, for more than 50 years. He’s produced five unexpected, wholly original American classics. Living American authors of his stature can be counted on one hand.

High temperatures came first from the croup: deep, painful coughs like lightning strikes at the solar plexus, threatening to split me in half. Later there were middle-ear infections: buzzings in my head, the outside world muffled through antihistamines and painkillers. Then came bronchitis: a tightening in the chest, a lack of oxygen, mucus rising like an organic sludge from the bottom of my lungs until every sound from me came wrapped in a bubbling wetness.

Some of my clearest memories, existing with a near-photographic clarity untrammeled by the erosive nature of time, are of my mother holding me through long winter nights over a hot-running sink or bathtub as I stared blankly, dreamily, crazily at the dirt- and mold-spotted mortar between the tiles of the room. She would drape a towel over both our heads so that I would breathe only steam. In a sonorous, calming voice she would sing and shush as we rocked, until, miraculously it seemed to me, she had saved me from dying again — a 30-year-old heroine in a tattered robe and shaggy slippers, the purple half-moons of exhaustion, of complete parental depletion, weighing down her eyes — opening up my bronchi so that I could breathe, maybe even sleep. In the morning we would be at the doctor’s office again, where both the horror and the strange magic of sickness would be temporarily destroyed.

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I routinely saw ghosts during the heights of illness and fever. I stop on this memory. Surely it is false. But perhaps that is not the point — truth or falsity. Whether the ghosts were figments or not, my visions of them, and my steadfast belief as a boy in the reality of these visions, were real, as truthful as anything I can think of, perhaps more so because of their force, the space they take up in my memory.

When the fevers came, I would lie nearly paralyzed by fatigue and a sort of slow-motion hysteria in my dark room in our small, brick house in Tidewater, Virginia. Crickets and frogs complained through the open windows. And I waited for shadows in the shape of the dead to walk through my bedroom door. Ghosts would stop, three paces in — always three paces: one, two, three — then vanish, each dark phantom becoming the next, like images bleeding together in a kaleidoscope.

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On Sundays, my family would go to the Methodist Church near our home, often walking there along the edges of cornfields, through a path in the woods, across vacant, overgrown lots. I didn’t mind going to church then (though I stopped attending completely as a teenager, when I discovered alcohol and marijuana and what I thought of as the liberating sounds of the Sex Pistols and X, among others), because the stories of Christ and the apostles, of miracles and magic and the inexplicable, were usually interesting and well told.

One Sunday, after a long week of illness and fevers, during the season of Lent, when the church was filled with purple cloth and white flowers, I first heard, or first really listened to, the story of Christ rising from the dead. Though this was certainly the most intriguing story thus far at church, beating out even Job and his boils, or Moses parting the Red Sea or the burning bush, or Christ conjuring food and drink from virtually nothing to sate the hungry masses, what made it profound to me was that it explained the ghosts that I saw with every high fever. People, people who lived on the earth long ago or shortly ago, died and were buried; but then, because Christ made it so, they rose from the dead and continued living, many of them for some reason stopping by my room.

To my mother sitting beside me in the pew I said, “I can see people like Jesus.”

She looked at me. “What?” she whispered.

“In my bedroom sometimes. There are people like Jesus.”

“Sshh,” she said, her hand resting heavily on my leg. “Don’t say things like that.”

A young girlfriend, Debra, the person I spent most of my time with on the weekends and in the summer, lived three doors down in a brick one-story on a quarter-acre grass lot identical, almost, to my family’s. She was adopted, as was her brother. Her father went jogging one day. He was forty, overweight. It was one of those heat waves you expect in the South — steaming asphalt, a weight to the sunlight, midday silences, mirages of water receding on the highways where the smell of melting rubber lingered. He had a massive heart attack on the sidewalk near my home. People came out, tried to help; paramedics were called. But it was too late. In a neighborhood where he had lived for nearly 15 years, a neighborhood in which real estate values were plummeting because of enforced busing, racial unrest and spiking crime rates against person and property, his heart had clenched tight as a locked jaw and quit.

I saw it happen. Or I think I saw it happen. In my memory there is a space reserved for the image of his collapsing: he is tying his shoe, then putting his ear to the root-cracked concrete to listen closely to a faint rumbling underground, then lying down to rest, to sleep.

Weeks later, after the funeral and the still silence of mourning that engulfed their house, I told Debra not to worry, that death was a door. People were still around, and mostly fine, and sometimes, when I was sick, I could see them. I buttressed my story with talk of God and Jesus, of Mary Magdalene, of the giant stone rolled away, of the empty tomb, the triumphant light of holiness and salvation. I now knew a story that could make everything better. I believed that somehow made me powerful, impervious to life’s ultimate tragedies.

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Getting off the bus one day — I was seven — I watched as a girl in a wheelchair, with a miniature body and a normal, adult-sized head, made as if to cross the busy highway just outside of our subdivision, where the bus dropped off the neighborhood kids on the wide sidewalks. The day was hazy, steamed up around the edges like a televised dream. The girl couldn’t see around the bus — a wall of yellow, the roar of cars. Probably she was mentally as well as physically impaired.

When the car hit her, she was thrown high into the air, coming down, lifeless, on the street’s grass median. The bluntness of the moment was a shock, like a hammer to the face. There was something false about it. It lacked narrative, lacked the simple decency of making sense. It was nothing like TV. No swelling of triumphant or tragic music. No fog effects, or noirish shadows around the body, no commentators spouting irony or melodrama or some sophisticated mixture of both. No chalk lines to be drawn. No dissonant guitar chords, or quick cuts toward overly weighted symbols, or a darkening screen to pull it all together. I’d gotten used to death as it was presented by the experts, people who’d studied the science of human perceptions, who knew about narrative formulas and the mathematics of audience emotions. Now Debra’s father and this — what? midget? dwarf? — Death happened in the blink of an eye; then it was over, a life expelled — so simple as to seem degrading, the degradation so venal as to almost necessitate an afterlife.

The bus driver, a large woman with strange configurations of moles like stellar constellations on her face, sent all the kids away. Then there were cops, paramedics, a quickly forming crowd. Someone was shouting and shouting and shouting, but you couldn’t understand any of it because the language was bent by panic, embroidered with loss, rising up and up and dissipating like factory smoke over our replicated homes.

At home, feeling numb and tingly, jarred and electrified, my spine fairly humming from adrenaline, still not quite believing what I saw to be real, I vomited. I couldn’t tell my mother what happened. I couldn’t find the breath, the right words. She heard about it from Debra’s mother. She tried to cheer me up, to make me forget, with sweet talk and rubbing and promises of treats and cartoons.

I didn’t go to school for the rest of the week, complaining, falsely, of an intense stomach ache, staring blankly at cartoons all morning (Wile E. Coyote dying and coming back, dying and coming back), running errands in the afternoon with my mother — the beauty salon, the drugstore, the post office — seeing, on the periphery of my vision, the dead girl rising up in shop windows. I noticed people in wheelchairs everywhere. I suddenly lived in a city of deformities — something wrong with the air here, the water. I had a strange feeling that if I went back on the bus I would be sentenced to see something like that every day. I wondered if during the next fever the little girl — or tiny adult — would roll through my darkened doorway, the bent wheels of her chair squeaking and clanking.

But I did go back to school. Eventually I had to. My best friend there was a black boy named Barry Fox. He was the funniest, smartest kid I knew, a true comedian with timing well beyond his elementary years. He said things to kids like: “Your momma’s so fat she leaves a ring around the pool.” “Your momma’s so fat she has to butter the bathtub to turn over.” “Your momma’s ass got its own zip code.”

One Monday, early in the spring, Barry didn’t come to school. He didn’t come on Tuesday or Wednesday either. On Thursday he showed up again but didn’t say anything. Finally, at lunch, he told me that his nineteen-year-old uncle, who lived with him and his mother and sisters in the Pine Chapel “projects,” had been stabbed to death in a fight. I could tell he was about to cry.

Again, in an effort to console, I told the story about my power to see the dead when I was sick. I tried to reassure him by telling him about Christ’s resurrection.

“What the hell you sayin’,” he almost shouted. He was suddenly furious, telling me that I didn’t know a thing about his uncle, or about Jesus, or about his family, or about black people, or about anything at all. He said that his dead-ass uncle wouldn’t be let into my white-ass house anyway, dead or alive. He was right.

Then he told me he hated me. Then he did cry, right into his open hands.

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I needed a fever to prove to myself that this was real, that I could see what I thought, what I believed, I could see.

But it was spring, harder to get truly, deathly ill when the weather was beautiful and warm. And — both blessing and curse, I thought — I seemed to be getting heartier, healthier; I was getting bigger and stronger, even good at sports.

I did have some close calls with fevers that spring, though.

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I would often go over to the Drabbles’ house. They were strict Southern Baptists. The father was a mechanic, as mean and quick to violence as any man I have ever been around; the mother stayed home with the nine children, ranging in age from four to eighteen. The children were not allowed to swim; the boys could not wear short sleeves or short pants; the girls wore floor-length handmade dresses and were not allowed to cut their hair, ever, their astounding manes cascading down below their waists. My family lived cramped in our small house with only four. They lived in a house considerably smaller than ours with eleven, which meant things tended to spill outside.

What spilled out of the house were the beatings. The father would take the boys out and beat them with his fists, rubbing their faces down into the dirt of the yard. The girls he would beat with a leather belt as he swung them around the yard by their hair or shirt or arm, each girl screaming at a slightly different pitch.

Usually, though, Mr. Drabble was not home weekdays.

I went to the Drabbles’ because they were, due to the pressures of their strict upbringing, I imagine, the worst kids I’d ever known — a whole new species of bad. The boys had pornographic magazines and shot BB guns at neighboring houses; they smoked cigarettes and drank stolen liquor in the woods. The oldest boy, who recently had a bullet shot into the door of his primer-colored El Camino “by a motherfucking spook,” always had pot and an assortment of pills.

The other thing that spilled out of their existence into the yard, piling up in the backyard, was junk. A paradise of junk. Because the father was a mechanic, a poor mechanic, a do-it-yourselfer, a fixer-upper, he brought home old engines and minibikes and motorcycle parts and steering wheels and hood ornaments and tires and bent rims and smashed-in doors and washing machines and refrigerators and forklift parts.

One day, Rodney, the youngest boy, a boy who had learned much from his father, began throwing heavy hubcaps into the air, seeing if he could accidentally smash one of his sisters’ skulls. One came down onto my head and knocked me nearly unconscious. It sounded like an alarm went off in my brain. Later, with my mother again tending to me, I felt nauseated, with a mild concussion, and I thought that perhaps a fever would follow. But, disappointingly, it didn’t.

A few weeks after this, on a blustery afternoon after a large northeaster had brushed the East Coast, taking out trees and light poles and local fishing piers, some kids and I were playing during a church social and cookout with an army parachute, the origin of which escapes me, but I imagine it had made its way from Vietnam into some kid’s attic. We devised a game. The wind was thunderous. The wind was an angry scream. You could let the parachute fill and it would tug several children holding onto the ropes along through a field, laughing and screaming.

The game was who could hold on the longest before the old parachute came to rest in a copse of trees. Being the winner of this game meant that I floated up over the field, up over the world, seeing broken bottles and abandoned tires and dog feces whizzing by beneath me, until, at a speed of ten or fifteen miles per hour, I went slamming through saplings and ultimately into a large pine tree.

For a moment, the wind knocked out of me, I felt close to death, nearly smiling to myself through my grimace and tears because I felt that nausea and vomiting, sure signs of a fever, were on their way. But I was seven, strangely able to shake off even the harshest physical traumas with nothing more than a good cry. I was eating Brunswick stew within the hour, singing Good News Bible hymns.

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When my mother was out of the kitchen I began sticking my head in the refrigerator, having heard that cold air on your head brought on sickness. I ate soap; I ate a whole can of years-old liverwurst I found in the back of my grandmother’s pantry because I’d once thrown up after doing so on a dare. I tried eating my grandmother’s chitlins (pig’s large intestines, fried). Nothing, nothing; nothing. I feared I’d never see the ghosts again.

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Summer evaporated. Fall arrived, with the sad news that we would be moving to a much nicer place, where only solidly middle-class white people lived. My father was going to stretch himself financially to get us out of this neighborhood, this city, and this school district that he believed were crumbling all around us.

Our impending move, our moving up in the world, was devastating news. I needed the fevers to see the ghosts; I also, I believed, needed the exactly perfect darkness of my bedroom in the hissing silence of night.

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The first cold snap came with rain and wind. I was down the street at Debra’s, who often asked me if I had seen her father. It wasn’t for her, really, but for her mother, who no longer left the house, who just sat at the kitchen table in her bathrobe, drinking instant coffee, staring at the chipped Formica.

Rain tapped on the windows of Debra’s room. Grayness coated everything.

I left their house and, through pouring rain and cold wind, walked through the fields near the church, out into the woods. I stayed there for several hours, praying. I didn’t know how to pray then, not really, not in the way I would learn years later, when I was angry and unmoored and broken, but I gave it my best, most earnest try. I leaned against a tree in the weird bright darkness, shivering and soaked, asking God to make me sick, to make me almost dead, to show me one more time that life was not just this, not just simply this. I prayed until I heard my mother and father shouting, a bit frantic-sounding, from our backyard.

Within 48 hours, I had the flu, a middle-ear ache, and the beginnings of the most virulent case of bronchitis I have ever suffered through.

My fever spiked at nearly 105 degrees before dropping back to 102. I slept in an icy tub for an hour, dreaming of carousels and lawn ornaments and ladders and wild cats and my mother’s voice miles and miles and miles away.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Then it was night again. I remained still in my bed. My head throbbed with every heartbeat. My mouth held the corroding taste of sickness. The darkness was perfect. I waited for Debra’s father, or Barry’s uncle, or the miniature, deformed girl in the squeaking and clanking wheelchair, or someone, anyone who had died, ever. I stared into the blackness. I leaned forward. Out my window, out in the real world, a car horn was bleating, and a dog was barking, and someone, somewhere, was falling asleep.

The Rapture, to be totally clear at the outset, is the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, a time at the end of history when true believers’ spirits will be “exalted to a knowledge of divine things.” This may sound like a good thing, Jesus being about love and hope and forgiveness in the four Gospels (which I happen to have read several times myself), but evidently, it is not.

In fact, I learned that I have been entirely wrong about this Jesus guy all these years. Jesus was no wishy-washy hippie, not the little limp-wristed tender boy you see in pictures. He was tough. He did not like lots of different kinds of people, especially homosexuals. The Second Coming, according to the seminar literature, will coincide with horrible tortures, pestilence and plagues visited upon “perverts, reprobates, pagans” and those who have not accepted the Christian Lord as their personal savior.

The speaker for the night was an evangelist named Tony “the Tiger” Mavrakos, a self-proclaimed bodybuilder and Seventh-Day Adventist reverend from Glendale, Md. The official title of the sermon was “Can Gays and Lesbians Go to Heaven?” and this, even in the pamphlet, was rhetorical, because obviously, according to Mavrakos and his skinny, mustachioed introducer Tom Sharply and the Northwest Evangelical Institute, they couldn’t.

Mavrakos came in late; things didn’t get started until almost 45 minutes after the announced time of 7:15 p.m. He was bespectacled and bearded, plump and bulky and sweating, wearing stiff-looking khakis and loafers. The devil had made Mavrakos’ teenage daughter get into a car accident back in Maryland, totaling one of his two cars and the back end of somebody else’s car. His daughter and the woman whose car she hit were OK, though, he said into the stage microphone, breathing hard from the hurry.

Many in the congregation audibly praised God for this. Mavrakos thanked them: “Amen, praise God.” But the car — man, the car was a goner, he said; that damn devil. “The Tiger” wiped his brow and hiked up his belt buckle in an x-treme way that actually separated his testicles on either side of the pant seam (a habit that at first was comical and later wince-inducing), and implied that he had a hard time making a living because he didn’t have his own church. No church is ready for Mavrakos. So his church is on the Internet, where he gives cyber-sermons and takes prayer requests via e-mail.

Mavrakos sticks to the letter of the Bible, and most churches nowadays in America, he says, are afraid of hurting people’s feelings, or upsetting some liberal, politically correct agenda. In fact, the “liberal agenda” has polluted churches, ruined them. Moral relativism is turning us away from biblical truths. “The church,” Mavrakos yelled, “was supposed to go out into the world. The world wasn’t supposed to come into the church!”

He then launched into a tirade about Jerry Falwell’s recent “caving in” to pressure from “perverts” when he allowed openly gay Christians into his church in Lynchburg, Va. (luckily, also near my home). Anyway, the point seemed to be that, because he refused the liberalism of contemporary mainstream Christianity (and yes, he seemed to be calling Falwell a liberal), a totaled car was a big deal — the devil at work, trying to stop Tony from preaching the Truth by giving him a good one right in the insurance premium — because Mavrakos wasn’t made of money like some of these hotshots on TV. He struggled for his God.

The devil had also made the beltway “extra crazy” tonight, “full of idiots,” and Mavrakos told us that sometimes he had to pull over to the side of the road and ask God to help him calm down when driving around Washington. It made sense that people were crazy, though, since these were the End Times and the devil was everywhere. “But that didn’t make that old devil any easier to take. Oh no.” Mavrakos looked like he wanted to kick over the huge podium — and he could have done it — but he wasn’t going to let the devil win. Not tonight. Because he had a vital message.

After another 10 minutes or so of seemingly riffing on whatever came into his mind while people in the audience began to fidget, Mavrakos got to the vital message. He asked if anyone had ever heard of Matthew Shepard. About half of us raised our hands. He smiled sarcastically, sighed. A few people near me in the back — three women in business suits and a couple in sweat pants, the man wearing a black, No. 3 NASCAR hat — shook their heads and sighed, clearly disgruntled by the thought of Matthew Shepard.

Mavrakos said that another man in Little Rock, Ark., was attacked by a band of homosexuals and murdered and sodomized the very same week that Shepard was murdered in Laramie, Wyo. “Why didn’t you hear about that?” he asked. He looked around, checking our faces, extending the pause. “Because the information you get in this country,” he yelled, “is skewed toward the left, toward an agenda that loves homos and sinners and sick, sick perverts and hates God-loving Christians! The media in this country is all owned by a few big corporations. Did you know that? That every bit of information you get from the mainstream media is controlled by only a few people. Do you think these people love God? Do you?!”

He had a point, I thought, about media ownership.

“Do you know what it is when a few corporations control everything?” Tony said. “I’ll tell you what it is: The big C.”

Ah, I thought: Corporate consolidation? Complete commodification? Capitalism?

“Communism!”

Communism?

“Communism.”

The middle-aged women near me were nodding their heads and taking notes. In fact, everyone there seemed to be in total agreement with this seriously wrong definition.

I taught English at the University of Virginia in 1997-98, and the teacher in me wanted to stand up and clarify our terms, explain that communism, as defined by Karl Marx in the 19th century and even by your basic “Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary,” was actually an ideology positing that the goods in a society should be “owned by all and equally distributed,” essentially the opposite of the wealth and power consolidation Mavrakos was speaking of, which Marx himself warned about. He seemed to be using the word “communism” for no better reason than that it connoted all kinds of bad stuff to conservative Americans. He spit the word with the same harsh tone that he used for “homosexual,” “liberal” and “Falwell.”

But then he got away from the liberal coverage of the Matthew Shepard case and back to Matthew Shepard, the “pervert.”

“What those two boys [Russell A. Henderson and Aaron J. McKinney] did was awful,” he said, lowering his voice. “They deserve everything they get. No question about that.” Silence from the small crowd. He then went on to explain that God indeed works in mysterious ways. “Matthew Shepard was a practicing … an open … an admitted homosexual. Does that lifestyle go without consequence? Can you openly defy God and escape all punishment?”

A lot of head-shaking, more sighs.

“He sees all things,” said Mavrakos. “His knowledge is infinite, and it is arrogant of us to assume his forgiving nature. The God in this book,” he said, standing in the middle of the stage, tapping the cover of his Bible, was capable of great anger over sin. More nodding from the crowd. An elderly woman who sang a long, a cappella version of “Jesus Is Love” while we waited for Mavrakos to arrive shouted, “Amen!”

He went from Matthew Shepard’s taunting God on to the predictable — and I thought all but extinct — argument that AIDS was a scourge upon sinners, a righting of a human wrong through divine destruction and suffering, somehow ignoring the fact that a large number of AIDS sufferers were heterosexual, living in the Third world, hemophiliacs, recovering drug addicts, people who contracted the disease from transfusions during surgeries, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, children, infants, Christians, even Seventh-Day Adventists, I imagine.

“I don’t hate gays,” Mavrakos said in regard to this. “I pray for them, and I pray every night for the sick. I’ve even had a few homosexuals in my house. I’m trying to save them, that’s what I’m here to do tonight. Maybe some of you out there are struggling with this issue, with your animalistic impulses. But I can’t defy God. I can’t save anyone, including myself, from the judgment of God. You must repent.” He tapped the Bible again. Sweat was beginning to ring the armpits of his jacket. “You reap what you sow.” He shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, It’s not me; it’s God. Sorry, AIDS sufferers; sorry, Matthew Shepard.

Even the military had decided to be “tolerant” toward the “perverts and reprobates.” “The Bible doesn’t teach tolerance,” Mavrakos said. “Please point out to me where it says anything about tolerance, where it says, Do what you want, live how you want. Point it out to me!”

Laughs from the ladies in front of me.

“Now Bill and Hillary Clinton have this … what is it? Don’t say, don’t know? Don’t ask, don’t speak? Anyway, they have a policy about ignoring gays in the service, saying it’s a private matter. It makes me sick,” he said, his spittle heading for the empty first row.

The Tiger ended the evening with a close look at what scripture says about homosexuality, which was so confusing I’m still trying to make sense of it. He showed passages on an approximately 10-by-10-foot screen using an overhead projector that he controlled with a remote. At the top of each sheet was written “X-treme Spiritual Awareness.”

His method was to pull up biblical passages, most of which, in Romans and Corinthians, were written by the apostle Paul, the punitive voice of the New Testament. However, of the eight or so passages he brought to our attention, only one passage in Romans actually mentioned men being with men, and that one somewhat cryptically. All the others simply mentioned sin or lust or debauchery, but in no way were they explicitly about homosexuality, and frankly I was confused as to how exactly he was arriving at this conclusion. But maybe it was me, because the rest of the place, again, was doing that grand, unified head-nodding thing. They were in a darn good mood.

We ended with a booming song of hope and praise, love and forgiveness, a triumphal dedication to the everlasting compassion of Jesus, our Savior. Mavrakos stood at the podium, bloated and red, beaming in delight at his hard-won knowledge of God’s mind. I looked at the singers standing around the room: men and women, young and old, about 80 percent white and 20 percent black. There was the group of professional-looking women near me, a well-dressed elderly couple in front of them. The NASCAR guy and his wife were hugging each other and swaying.

Behind me, leaning against the concrete wall, were two little girls, maybe 7 or 8, in bell-bottoms and thick-soled skater shoes with fake tattoos of crosses on their forearms. They were smiling at one another, each one missing a couple of baby teeth, singing about the Truth and the Light at the top of their lungs.

God in the lives of men is nothing new. It’s a story that unfurls backward through the history of thought, meaning, reason. I’ve spent a lot of time tracing it, reading it over and over, in a hundred different ways. Characters change. Theres a new setting, a twist in this plot that wasn’t in that one. But it is an old, old story, as old as Story itself. I compare my brother with other narratives involving God. He, She, It is the common language between us. That’s how I place Michael, make sense of him, re-imagine him — alongside saints and martyrs, lunatics and heretics, those who have fallen, shaken and supplicant, pleading, palms aimed heavenward, at the thought of God, His voice, the sweet, terrible whisper in their ear.

Jesus. Abraham, Jacob, Paul. St. Mark, Matthew, John. Joan of Arc, Hildegaard, John Brown. Charles Manson, Jim Jones, David Koresh.

Blake saw angels in trees. Thoreau imagined the possibility of divinity, the sublime, in a knothole. Whitman saw God in the salivating mouth of a soldier’s bullet hole. Mother Teresa knew the force of God lived even in the fecal rivers of Asian cities, the venereal fever of a beaten whore. I used to watch a man who lived on the streets of Richmond, Va., who spent hours shouting “Jesus” while in paroxysms, drooling, his fly open. But they didn’t see Him. None of them. Not like my brother.

So I dwell; I obsess; I remember in unmoored chunks, half-scenes, things that have to be pieced together, arranged.

That night, when I was 10, I couldn’t move. The feeling of immobility, of being trapped, sticks in my mind. I stood in his doorway, a night-light golden behind me, wearing pajamas, fat-faced and freckled, looking at my brother while he screamed, all open mouth and high-pitched wail. His face was contorted like a snake handler’s, like a strychnine drinkers in the documentaries I would watch years later, late at night, with a VCR remote in my hand.

I stood, squinting into darkness. The memory is a series of fragments. Maybe, at 10, with my eyes barely open, I saw the future. Maybe I saw in the dark of the room, heard in the screams, that one day soon he would be living on the streets, hungry; that he would be diagnosed as an acute paranoid schizophrenic; that he would leap from a van going 45 miles per hour to avoid institutionalization; that he would frighten women, children, neighbors, us; that he would be raped; that he would admit to a murder he didn’t commit; that his face would be on the front page of local newspapers, the killer, the rapist; that he would attempt suicide for the first time by drinking Drano, the second time by hanging himself; that he would dismantle the fire alarms in my parents’ home and light it on fire, ultimately ending up in a Virginia maximum-security prison, praying and crying, by then all but dead to me, locked away in a place I would never visit, a brother — same curve of flesh, angle of jaw, color of eyes — who had become a few cryptic letters full of biblical quotes, who I don’t think would recognize me.

I go over and over this. My memory is a scratched record: There I am, watching, cautious, afraid of him, afraid to step into the room, because of his early propensity for petty cruelties: charley horses and wedgies, dirt clods and airplane spins, skinned knees and bloody lips and mean laughter. The stuff of early childhood, of brothers, but from him: different, darker, done with an eerie pleasure.

He ripped a poster from his wall, knocked over a red lava lamp, the only source of light within the room, spreading glass, a viscous gel.

My father built this house in the suburbs, most of it by himself. He could still barely afford it, had to sign half his life away to a bank. But we were away from blacks and crime and bad neighbors and people as poor as we were. We were pretending, for the sake of appearances, that we had money, though the old rusty Ford Rambler in our driveway must have given us away. Our pretending was in the scent of new wood, the chemical stench of fresh, shaggy carpets; it was in the long blades of light through our new windows from the streetlight outside, in the feeling in my memory of cotton pajamas with feet in them, in my brothers screams. Our pretending was in the black-light posters, the ones that glowed sharply in my brother’s room — Bruce Lee, Hendrix, Foghat, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Led Zeppelin, comic-book covers from “Conan the Barbarian” and “Heavy Metal” and the animated film “American Pop.” Our pretending was everything we did and had. Our pretending is how we survived, how we hovered just slightly above our actual lives, which, over the years with Michael, felt increasingly unreal.

It seemed plausible to me then that God could be in our window. I sometimes felt a cool tingle, like the breath of a navigable congregant, during the hymns at church. Electricity surged through life during sermons — the stained glass, the pastor’s booming voice, the organ notes in my stomach and testicles. It was wonderful and frightening, the best and worst feeling. I’ve spent my life, starting from this moment in my brother’s room, at once doubting and believing, fearing and embracing God; or at the very least, the thought of God in me, in others. I’m all atheist and a true believer. I value reason and hope for transcendence. I value the four strange and very repetitive Gospels of Jesus as much as any books I’ve read, but I can’t imagine attending a church now, listening to simple aphorisms and affirmations, having become acutely suspect of all proclamations.

But I believed God was there for Michael that night, hovering in the window. I don’t mean a hallucination; I’m not speaking figuratively; I mean that what was in the window that night for Michael was as real as the skin on his face. He’d stepped outside of our tenuous collective reality and into alternate space, a space where God was a shape, a newly decipherable language.

He had been at an Ozzy Osbourne concert at the Coliseum. It was 1980. He’d dropped six hits of acid. In his room he was having his first psychotic break. It came in the form of crippling guilt, ruthless introspection. He was Jesus being scolded by an angry Father. He wore sin, all sin, heavy as lead shackles. God made him look at himself, and he was a stone with a miniscule heart.

He flailed. He cut his feet on the glass from the lava lamp. He turned and pleaded to and then punched a neon, growing Bruce Lee. God was torturing him with the things he had inside himself, with his own feelings and memories. His thoughts were razor-sharp. He started breaking everything he touched. A piggybank in the shape of a football, spreading coins across the floor; his stereo case; a picture frame containing a family picture, each of us smiling under a blue sky against a blue, blue ocean.

But memory fades, tricks, becomes convenient, reshapes itself. It’s been 19 years. I remember my mother and father there now, as if conjured from air or simple need, standing at the threshold of Michael’s room. Glass scattered everywhere, shining like quartz.

My father hesitated. He wasn’t much bigger than Michael, 5 foot 8 inches, 160 pounds. And Michael was swinging, the LSD pumping panic through his blood. My father knew. He wasn’t surprised. He knew about the drugs and the heavy metal and the bad friends and the skipping school. Michael was a problem kid. Always had been. Foul-mouthed. Willing to experiment with anything. My father knew and wanted to change things, to make it better, but the kid was out of control, sometimes violent. He knew how simultaneously sophisticated and irresponsible kids were these days. They knew more than they could handle knowing. They’d granted themselves a dangerous, cynical sort of freedom. Sex at 12, 13. Drinking, drugs, even earlier. He knew. He even, if he had thought hard enough about it, knew that mental illness was our family’s sickness. His mother had been institutionalized twice. His own father, who was dead, had lived in a terminal funk, carrying the weight of a world that he knew cared nothing for him. His grandfather in North Carolina had clenched the barrel of a 12-gauge between his teeth, spreading chunks of hair and bone along the wall, while his nine children were downstairs playing. Before this, my great grandfather, as Michael would soon, had taken to quoting scripture at length, mixing dogma with threats and expletives.

If my father had thought about it while watching Michael that night, he’d have realized that the chances of his son seeing the face of God, in some form, were not so astronomical, even without the acid.

I looked up at him — he seemed like a giant — wondering what was required of me. He wore sweatpants and a night-league softball shirt with “Three Dog Night” stenciled across the chest. He had big sideburns and wavy auburn hair, was only six or seven years older than I am now, with the massive hands of a worker. He was barefoot. It was after midnight, and the stars out the window were more ground glass.

What do I remember about my mother? She was composed. She was withdrawn. She must have been crying. She’s always been given to quick, private tears. Yes, she was foundering. She knew Michael better than anyone, is perhaps the only person who has ever really known him, even though he hid things from her, was secretive to the extreme. In fact, this was the last straw in an ongoing line of last straws that spread out in front of us like taillights on a highway. This was the last straw like taking him back in the house after kicking him out will be the last straw, the last straw like picking him up from jail will be, the last straw, really, until the next last straw, and then the next. She was motionless, out in the hall, cast in shadow from the low-wattage night-light.

These days she got calls from school, from neighbors, from the parents of girls her 14-year-old may have slept with. She got headaches she blamed on the stress of Michael. She prayed for Michael. She locked her bedroom door at night when my father wasn’t home.

My father, I remember, clicked on the light. That simple move seemed dangerous, bold, courageous. The room felt charged, alive. Shards of broken glass the size of human teeth spread over the floor. The lava lamp’s snot glistened on the new carpet. Michael calmed. The window had now become a mirror. Instead of the accusatory face of God, the angry father, he saw only himself, a pallid face and tears and eyes black as coal. His feet bled, were completely red with blood. I remember glass sticking out of them in different directions like sharks’ teeth. My mother called for an ambulance. My father went to him, walking over the glass, not even considering the glass, and pulled him to his chest.

And I remember my father — who died one month before Michael went to prison in 1993 — sitting on the bed, holding Michael, this big kid in an Ozzy Osbourne T-shirt sprawled awkwardly on his lap. They were rocking back and forth. Michael was slack, almost a corpse. He looked empty, drained of all life, of any former self.

I can see us all in my memory, even myself, the kid, the character, the narrator. It’s quiet now. I smell the chemical newness of our home. I’m floating over my past, catching fragments of our lives, to make it into a story. I have an aerial view: I see myself seeing the first evidence of my brother’s blossoming insanity; I hear my first fragmented thoughts of God, feel my first real spiritual dread; I see my mother rummaging through the bathroom medicine cabinet for Mercurochrome, Band-Aids; and I see my father — I see this clearly — holding Michael, probably for the last time, holding him like an infant, shushing him, rubbing his hands through his sweaty hair. Their feet drip blood into a small puddle as if from one vein.

My father is whispering. I lean in, listen. He is telling us it will all be fine.

Time passes. Sam and Ed go about their happily monogamous life in liberal Cambridge. Then Julie, now separated from Billy, dies while she is shooting up (a bubble in the syringe), and it turns out that she has named Sam Scot’s legal guardian. (The shiftless Billy and his new girlfriend are by then living in South America.)

That’s the setup. The main action, which takes place in the first few months after Scot’s arrival, adds up, as you might expect, to a wry look at a new configuration of the American family. But there is a twist — a near-brilliant one, which pushes the novel’s humor and pathos to the limit: Scot is an 11-year-old Truman Capote or Quentin Crisp, limp wrists and all. He shows up with a musical hairbrush and two makeup kits. He loves Pink Gardenia hand lotion and pantyhose and won’t leave the house without his Chap Stick. He wears a white patent-leather belt with “pink dancing dogs and jazzy little musical notes” on it, and his interest in school sports is limited to baton twirling and possibly cheerleading.

Everyone in the fifth grade thinks he’s gay, of course, but he’s too young to know what he is — only that he isn’t like most other boys. (Delicate and otherworldly, he reminds Ed of a cherub in a pre-Renaissance painting.) Sam and Ed finally admit to each other that his flamboyant behavior embarrasses them; Ed confesses that when he looks at Scot, he sees what the school bully sees.

The book’s domestic dramas are deftly done and convincing enough to make you wince or laugh, or else to bring a lump to your throat. The novel is not simply a comedy of upside-down manners but also a testament to the joys and foibles of parenting (however you define it) and to the amazing resilience of “different” children in the face of banal, everyday cruelty. The characters are interesting and complex; 30 pages in, it’s easy to forget that they’re fictional, that this isn’t heartfelt testimony from a parent about a real son. And the most interesting and complex of them all is Scot, one of the great child creations of recent literature — a dainty, prepubescent Holden Caulfield with a thing for neckerchiefs.

Jeffery Smith’s “Where the Roots Reach for Water” is part autobiography of depression and part cultural investigation into what, exactly, depression is. Smith pondered drowning himself in a Montana river when his cocktail of medications sent him spiraling even further out of control than the depression they were meant to treat had; after that event, he embarked on an intellectual journey in search of the true face of melancholia (his word for depression). The result is, like Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” a compendium of one writer’s reading and thinking on the subject — essentially, a highly aestheticized commonplace book. What makes it singular is the intellectual and moral seriousness with which he thinks and writes about his illness while in the grip of it. And his control of structure and pacing is splendid.

The book is a searing account of his own depression. When Smith writes of stealing petty cash from the office where he has a job as a clinical social worker and not remembering it, then being asked to leave, you almost feel the effects of his illness — you are in the trap with him, humiliated. Intellectually, his investigation ranges from ancient theory, myth and astrology to Eastern philosophy, the literature of Appalachia, Christianity and contemporary psychology and biology. His ultimate point is that melancholia is and always has been an integral part of the complete self, and the notion of a pill to stanch the symptoms is ludicrous. The book is really two books, a personal history and a natural one, but ultimately it is a powerful, finely honed investigation into what, exactly, the self and sadness have meant and continue to mean over time and across cultural boundaries.

John Bentley Mays’ “In the Jaws of the Black Dogs” takes an entirely different tack. Mays states early on: “There are a great many books about depression. This is not one of them. It is pain written, not observed; a depressive writer’s writing, a testament transcribed from wounded flesh to paper.”

The author is the art and culture critic for the Toronto Globe and Mail, and this book began as an essay for the Canadian magazine Saturday Night. It is, in a sense, a testament transcribed. Where Smith investigates the nature of depression writ large and tries to make sense of himself within the myriad definitions, Mays unwinds the memories of his life (his defeats and losses and humiliations), rescuing scenes and events from oblivion and reimagining the crucial moments. Growing up in the American South, he lost his alcoholic father (who may have been murdered) when he was 7. His mother died of lung cancer when he was 11. He was already thinking about suicide when he went to live with his father’s parents. In 1968, as a graduate student in English, he made his first suicide attempt.

Mays writes eloquently of his ongoing struggle, of the ever-present pull of death, of his family, of literature, of his Christianity. However, the book is less a literary memoir (that is, a nonfiction narrative that is dependent on the formal devices of fiction) than Mays’ memoirs, by which I mean the kind of birth-to-now record of one’s life usually reserved for celebrated public figures. What raises “In the Jaws of the Black Dogs” to the level of art is its language, which at its best has an elliptical lyricism reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory” (though at its worst it plummets toward narcissistic bathos). All in all this is a moving, uncomfortable record of a joyless life in which every moment has been one to endure.

At this point, memoir presents the seemingly endless possibilities that the novel did at the end of the last century. What the form needs now is writers willing to take risks — which Smith and Mays surely do.