Ebook Overview
O Sinners!
By Nicole CuffyOne World: 464 pages, $28
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What’s the road between a faith and a cult? It entails cash, little doubt. And management over who you may see and what you may say. And a narcissistic chief too. However the line nonetheless can get fuzzy shortly; mainstream church buildings have had their very own darkish historical past of abuse and exploitation. Probably the most engrossing components of Nicole Cuffy’s second novel, “O Sinners!,” is the way it dwells comfortably within the fuzziness, making for each a intelligent literary thriller novel and a meditation on the character of religion.
The novel’s protagonist, Faruq, is sort of custom-designed to dwell on these questions. An achieved journalist for a New Yorker-style publication with a specialty in tradition and race, he’s a lapsed Muslim, unattached and mourning his late father however soldiering on. As a strategy to stave off burnout however maintain working, he pursues a extra enjoyable task, heading to a 16,000-acre compound within the Northern California redwoods that’s residence to the “nameless,” a group led by Odo, “a Vietnam War vet with a penchant for coming up with catchy phrases that sounded like wisdom.”
And never simply catchy phrases: The “nameless” attracts hundreds of followers on Instagram with honeyed photos and all the right wellness hashtags. Faruq is understandably skeptical of all of it, particularly the methods Odo appears gifted at extracting donations from very rich and devoted followers. One in every of them says they’re merely rejecting the world and its “distortions,” however to an outsider it seems rather a lot like captivity.
“O Sinners!” alternates throughout three narrative tracks. The primary focuses on Faruq’s journey to the redwoods, as his preliminary plan to spend six weeks following Odo turns into months of immersion in the neighborhood. The second is a screenplay of a documentary a few battle between the “nameless” and a conservative Christian Texas city that changed into a authorized conflagration over sexual abuse and defamation. The third is the saga of a U.S. Military firm in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970, as a bunch of males trek throughout the jungle, land in firefights and use downtime to josh and struggle over God, nation, race and extra.
A kind of troopers turns into Odo; Cuffy’s neat trick is that we are able to’t decide which one till the novel’s finish. It might be Preacher, who has a non secular bent; or Greater, the uncooked however hyperobservant new recruit; or the war-weary Silk, who already has a Purple Coronary heart; or the aggressive Loopy Horse. Metaphorically, Cuffy suggests, a person of cult-leader timber possesses a few of these traits. However the one factor all of these males shared was trauma, and a capability to suppress it. Whichever man Odo is, he’s a person who’s able to protecting up just about something with layers of sophistry, turning into “as smooth and serene as the Sphinx.”
Faruq’s function because the hero of the story is to tunnel into Odo’s previous and motivations, even whereas he reckons along with his personal emotions about his Muslim upbringing and the way in which it nonetheless shapes his life. “He was forming a theory about the distinction — or lack thereof — between a cult and a religion in its nascency,” Cuffy writes. And Cuffy is just too, after all. The “nameless” doesn’t have a sexually rapacious chief like NXIVM or an exploitative monetary scheme like Scientology or a doomsday philosophy like Heaven’s Gate. Faruq can’t discover a single disillusioned former member. Odo is a subtler determine. Although his “18 utterances” are plainly Judeo-Christian-Islamic goulash borrowing from the Ten Commandments and past, they appear largely benign.
But tucked among the many encouragements to get “hipped to oneness” and “train the other sight” is the darkish glimmer of the place the cult-religion line blurs. The Odo commandment “do not despair of death” reads on the floor like compassion — acceptance of loss is one thing everybody, together with Faruq, must handle. However on the compound, it additionally encourages a sure callousness, a willingness to not intervene when the worst occurs. Faruq sees it when he’s compelled to assist with births within the compound’s horse stables, however he additionally witnesses it metastasize across the people. A faith respects dying and aspires to information followers by way of the grief it provokes; a cult sees dying as mere proof that life is reasonable.
Cuffy is presented at displaying how that distinction empowers Odo and baffles Faruq, and the screenplay parts give the novel a concreteness — a particular drama — with out which it’d flip right into a woollier, talkier and fewer dramatic ebook. (A lot of Faruq’s keep is consumed by conversations with Odo the place he bats away direct questions, giving Faruq the telling, condescending nickname of “scholar.”) Nonetheless, Cuffy’s remedy of the “nameless” isn’t fully persuasive. What makes Odo so fascinating that folks would quit tens of millions to him isn’t clear; it’s exhausting to see how Odo, who spends his days delivering benisons and posing for Insta, manages what’s successfully a metropolis; and the reader is left questioning what’s occurring with the “Deep,” a militia patrolling the grounds.
However “O Sinners!” is as a lot a non secular thought train as it’s a real looking novel. The “nameless” is clearly on the cusp of one thing — able to both break within the route of a mainstream faith or give in to its darkest instincts. In that regard, Cuffy suggests, we people don’t should be skeptical simply of what a religion is providing however of what we’re unwilling to confront for the sake of being a servant to it. Odo could also be proffering a “web of fairy tales and other religions,” however it doesn’t take a cult chief to promote that. And any type of particular person can fall into it.
Athitakis is a author in Phoenix and writer of “The New Midwest.”
