Photo credit: Kevin P. Keating
Literary critics and academics would go into spasms over Kevin P. Keating’s latest novel, a fertile field for them to babble about its brilliance, infusing their reviews with every one of their favorite buzzwords learned in graduate school.
The rest of us ordinary humans (smelly, tired from our day jobs that feed our families and make our muscles strong, and uneducated hoi polloi that academics think we are) would simply delight in well-written, complex prose that entertains us for several hours and teaches us something about the human condition.
Therefore, if you, the reader of this review, is a literary critic or an academic, read the immediate following paragraphs, titled “For Academic Snobs”. If you, reader, are an ordinary man or woman, go to the “For Hoi Polloi” section.
For Academic Snobs
Keating’s latest novel satisfies the deep desire for us academics to display our prowess in using polysyllabic literary terms and literary criticism phrases which may be meaningful to us (well, some of us) but are overused, tiresome, and thus insignificant to ordinary people.
For example, if one is a Marxist literary critic, then he or she would delight in the power relationships and polarities of the city vs. the country, or the uneducated in the rural environments vs. those in urban universities, or the economic struggles of the poor working classes of the nineteenth century vs. the civil rights of AI robots in the twenty-first century.
Similarly, if one is a feminist critic, then one would cheer with wild abandon the rise of female characters who break the mold of patriarchy and revolt against their oppressors and against males who use their phalluses in traditionally male occupations (in alphabetical order, even though alphabetical order is a component of the patriarchy: astronauts, chemists, farmers, pet owners [a boy and his dog, you know], space technicians, etc.) and who thus overthrow the aforementioned patriarchy to blah blah blah…male oppression, blah blah…patriarchy…blah blah…heterosexual normativity…and even more blah…whatever.
For those who are T in the LGBTQ configuration, sorry, but, while Keating’s novel is semi-fantasy, it is not a narrative of the mental illness of transgender persons. In this work, a human with a dick is a man, whether that penis is represented by a cane or a rocket ship (hmmm…size does matter, huh?).
However, like most examples of an academic immersion into the application of literary theories to a work, which reduce themselves to mere adolescent snickering of phallic and yonic jokes, I digress. Suffice it to say that academics (especially adjunct faculty in woke community colleges and universities which were once orthodox Catholic but have now fallen away from their Catholic intellectual and spiritual roots) could apply any of the other literary theories to the novel and write a sufficiently long academic article for a scholarly journal that no one would ever read but which would look real good on a curriculum vitae, especially if the article contains numerous instances of the DIE buzzwords (“diversity”, “inclusion”, and “equity”) and are coupled with LGBTQ terms, sprinkled with pro-Hamas terrorist language about killing Jews.
For Hoi Polloi
Readers who are ordinary real people and not pretentious academics, who believe in common sense, who are God-fearing, and who vote pro-life, work at their jobs and raise families or, if they choose to remain single, use their state of life for the betterment of humanity in their own unique ways, will greatly enjoy Keating’s novel as an instrument to satisfy the ancient Roman dictum that all literature should entertain and teach.
Admittedly, the narrative structure of Bridge of Dreams is challenging to follow. Yanking the reader from a present which is not current (1957 and not 2025) to a century in the past (1857) and then thrusting him or her to two centuries in the future (2057) disturbs standard in medias res.
A chronological order of time in a narrative, however, is not the intention of this work, which attempts to connect the life experiences of contemporary (1957) odd rural Ohio characters somehow with the space activities of the United States circa 1957 with a nineteenth-century odd rural Ohio prophetess and a twenty-first century odd urban Ohio graduate student in English cavorting with odd rural Ohioans who affirm the existence of space “Travelers” (aliens).
Fortunately, the disruption in narrative time is eased by allusions to common cultural symbols, the recognition of which would encourage the reader to continue the journey through the odd narrative. When a character “arrives at a murmuring brook that flows swiftly through sandy banks” (181), is that an oblique reference to Hawthorne’s babbling brook in The Scarlet Letter? The most mildly educated person, someone called hoi polloi by the academic lords and masters, would delight in the allusion, even though this reader’s perception of the connection is utterly idiosyncratic.
Similarly, the following character’s reflection on the state of her existence:
“Do you ever get the impression,” says Ms. Deepmere, “that you’re not really here? That you’re just a character in a story? And you hope the reader doesn’t get bored and close the book? Or the author stops typing mid-sentence, this sentence, the one I’m speaking right now?” (150)
Is this the fevered hope of the author himself or an allusion to Luigi Pirandello, whose Six Characters in Search of an Author was so groundbreaking in Western literature?
A final example will illustrate that some allusions are not idiosyncratic, but universal. We who are hoi polloi (especially us PhDs who are labeled such by our leftist and woke “colleagues” in academia because we are Catholic or conservative and vote pro-life or Republican) will immediately perceive a topic in the novel which the world’s experience with the China virus generated: an eminently healthy disrespect for those who argue that the scientific method is the be-all and end-all of human life (see, for example, characters’ commentary on the failures of the scientific method on pages 122 and 198).
Above all, a final take-away from reading Keating’s novel concerns self-inflated academics and the powers that be who think they know everything about human life, its beginnings, its encounters with alien forces, or humanity’s relationship with the divine. And Keating manifests this disdain through humor.
The comedic foundation of the novel leads me to see that academics and the educated classes don’t know (let’s see…how would hoi polloi say it? oh, yeah) shit. It’s as though the author (or the narrator, or the individual characters) are laughing at people who take this novel seriously, as though it’s a treatise by St. Thomas Aquinas to explain humanity’s relationship with God and how time and space are factors in that human-divine relationship as the Church Fathers suggested in the first three centuries of our common Christian era.
Is this why the author, early on in the novel, seems to allude to himself when a character talks about being shoved “down the stairs like a theater critic punishing the author and principal star of an unhappy farce” (50)? If the author mocks himself thus, then we have his permission to enjoy the narrative by laughing at it.
The 203 pages of Keating’s work have satisfied my need for entertainment, sometimes laughing out loud at the impossibilities of characters’ destinies, and has given me much to ponder. The Foreword to the novel by M. E. Pickett, editor and publisher of Lost Colony Magazine, says that Keating’s novel leaves him “with more questions than answers” (xii). Yeah, OK.
In contrast, Keating’s novel impresses me with another didactic response, an answer to the contemporary malaise experienced by persons like Keating’s characters, seemingly bereft of religious faith. This is Holy Week, not only for Christians but for the entire planet, and I must reflect on the merging of space and time which occurred, not in the fictional pages of odd Ohio characters, but in the God-Man who came to Earth to save us from human pride and stupidity.
But then, this reader-response personal conclusion is compatible with the novel’s numerous free-for-all associations. If the novel can refer to a cathedral as a “medieval spaceship” (198), then contemporary readers and I will be perfectly justified in delighting in similar wordplay to challenge or to reinforce our beliefs. For that reason, Keating should be congratulated for having produced a profound creative work.