Blue Walls Falling Down
By Joshua Hren
Angelico Press, 2024.
Paperback, 436 pages, $22.95.
Reviewed by David G. Bonagura, Jr.
Can love reconcile America’s partisan divide between left and right, between racially obsessed identity politics and radicalized nativist populism? Stella Tęsknota, abandoned after Blake Yourrick broke their engagement, unwittingly finds herself as a bridge linking these two worlds. But like the blue walls that mysteriously reappear throughout Blue Walls Falling Down—in crossword puzzles, in Stella’s room at her Nonna’s home, in a church—Stella’s life is falling down because, like the crossword puzzle, “the meaning is missing.” Not strong enough to straddle the divide, she finds only one open door after all the others close: a return to her past.
Joshua Hren has already demonstrated his mastery of probing and satirizing contemporary pathologies in this novel’s predecessor, Infinite Regress, which was also a tragic drama but filled with more comedic interludes. In this loose yet independent sequel, Hren focuses on three major characters whose broken lives exhibit three cultural phenomena, two of which spiked after the social upheavals of 2020: Stella, the thirty-nine-year old single woman desperate for a child; Peter Clavier (P.C.), a counselor by day who agitates racial conflict by night; and Regan, Stella’s father and the novel’s most colorful character, whose concern for voting integrity and unpoliced crime led him to Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, when “he felt a camaraderie he never even longed for because he had not known it could exist.”
Her future shattered, Stella flees Milwaukee to Chicago’s South Side, where she found work as a teacher in St. Cabrini School. She was idealistically determined to do the impossible: educate her students so they could rise out of their poverty. There she meets Peter Clavier, whose name is one letter different from Jesuit missionary Saint Peter Claver, a Spaniard who for decades heroically ministered to African slaves in Cartagena, present-day Colombia. Stella wasted no time: between classes she asks P.C. for therapy and then asks him on a date. On their way to the restaurant, Charon’s Kitchen, Stella discovers that this Clavier is a missionary for the racially oppressed as he jeers at a police officer. P.C. later confesses a horrible crime from his past; it simmers in her mind without boiling over. P.C. the counselor has other issues he unloads on her (“Wasn’t until you I could start to be truthful about how crossed-out my heart had become.”): inner conflict from his mixed-race identity (“Can you imagine how awful, for a black boy, it’d be, to be white without being white?”), assurances from his Uncle Cedric that he had the skills to make it big as a racial rabble rouser, doubts were generated from his broken family life. Stella listened in the hopes “it could lighten the burden of a man she so admired from a distance and who now disclosed his deeper identity as—the secret she would perfectly keep—himself a Man of Sorrows.”
The lengthy expedition through P.C.’s psyche momentarily sidetracks the novel, but it does not completely deter Stella, who chose him to be the one to give her that child, to fulfill that “desire, the persistent presence that would not die, accompanied almost always by the nagging fear that she could not make a baby anymore.” Except the child does not satisfy her; Stella is more miserable after young Jason is born than before. Never does she look upon him and smile, never does she revel in the maternity she once could not stop dreaming of. Like most of Hren’s characters, she is carefully named: her Polish surname means “yearning,” “longing,” or “melancholic desire.”
Stella’s inner turmoil builds after P.C. receives a prominent and lucrative position stirring racial unrest in Washington, D.C. She refuses his invitation to join him. He sends her checks; she never cashes them. He sends her text messages; she never answers them. She fears he is with another woman; she does not want to be his woman. His self-absorption, she tells her brother, “is basically an illness, incurable, fatal.” Stella, “in the longest, darkest night of her life,” returning to her family home with a child no one knows about, loses control: “I’ve gone crazy, take this baby!”
Her dysfunctional family home includes her drug-addicted brother and her father Regan, who, together with his friends, bears guns and gas masks in the basement, where they drink and connive as neighborhood vigilantes whose “mission is not hate but law and order.” They aim to protect “another America, passing if not already past, the family photo album of flyover country—the Midwest’s dead consensus, admirers of President Reagan.” One friend named Tailor advises: “You can drift toward the grave for the next decade or two, hating what your country has become, strewing memories like flowers around the headstones of your grave…or you can form a brotherhood already felt, give definition to a movement that is already existent but, scattered, is satellites without a center.” These disgruntled white men are out there, Stella notes, “racializing everything”—just like P.C. is doing in D.C.
An unforeseen explosive then detonates near Stella: a repentant Blake, not having spoken to a woman for three years, returns to find her. He meets Jason. Stella then makes a surprise visit to see P.C., whose racial-agitating reputation would be undermined by his white girlfriend. When he unexpectedly saw his son while speaking, “his face fell through the stage floor.” Stella and Jason return to Milwaukee without P.C. She confines her dilemma to her father: “I miss Blake. I miss Peter…. I was so scared of every future I tried to erase any at all.”
When a repentant P.C. eventually arrives in Milwaukee, he meets Stella’s family and her dad’s suspicious friends. Fighting breaks out in her presence. Blood spills. Stella, confused and without faith, goes to confession. She is trapped, “sinking down, on her knees, begging death.”
Uncle Cedric’s attempt at theodicy in a Chicago church brings the novel to its unexpected close. Forgiveness of one’s enemies, not violence, as Cedric himself grants to an intruding vandal, is the only way to justice. Stella herself attempts to forgive Blake. The future ironically becomes less terrifying when she accepts the past. Whether the racial left or the radical right, whether the unmarried women or the immature men of today can do the same is not answered. By shining light on the excesses of both, Hren shows us the paths not to take.
David G. Bonagura, Jr., is religion editor of The University Bookman. He is the author, most recently, of 100 Tough Questions for Catholics.
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