The Deposition by Pete Duval

The Deposition by Pete Duval
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021; 216 pp., $19.95

“If you don’t want God now, could you want to want God?” A parish priest of mine used to ask this of friendly atheists and agnostics.

“The more Mayhew pretended to pray, the more he doubted the project of documentation” (italics original), writes Pete Duval in the very first line of “Strange Mercies,” the sixty-page story that concludes his 2021 collection The Deposition. Doubting documentation is to begin to trust intuition. And what could it mean to pretend to pray? Is it not the same as wanting to want?

Mayhew, a lapsed Catholic, is a cameraman on assignment for a Catholic cable network (ICBN-the Fox News of Catholic media) in a walled Caribbean port city, searching for a girl with stigmata who has briefly captured the imagination of American television. After a fruitless few weeks the network reports that the girl has been cutting herself with a steak knife and recalls Mayhew and his partner. But Mayhew is a believer, in the girl at least. He remains in the walled city against company wishes, beginning a frantic search for the girl as his pay is cut off and his wife threatens to leave him.

The walled city becomes a kind of Purgatory, the girl a fixation that threatens to become an idol. Ironically, Mayhew initially saw his work for ICBN as just a job, looking down on their credulous viewer, the “low-information consumer of religious media,” believing himself to be above the admittedly cringeworthy corporate attitudes of his bosses (“Mindshare, soulshare, eyeballs, deliverables…”). God has a sense of humour.

In his attempt to find and film the girl Mayhew enlists the help of a local street kid, who, because of the language barrier, thinks he is after a prostitute. Mayhew is beaten up by thugs and has his video camera destroyed, but most of his suffering is self-inflicted. He lurches from compulsion to compulsion, from Mass to pornography, from rum to Eucharistic Adoration—and always the search for the miracle.

Duval puts precisely the modern person’s dilemma in Mayhew’s mind, in the following passage:

Drunk, he allowed himself to luxuriate in the ambiguities, his whole pathetic life balanced on a knife-edge between childlike faith and sneering mockery, whiplashing from nihilist to penitent in the breath of a single sentence, jeering at the grotesqueries of religious belief—the silly hats, the psychopathic prohibitions against the smallest joys, Amish suspenders, dervish slippers, the fountains of undisguised misogyny, and the threadworn political expediencies of church-and-state history—then regretting the utterance before it had fully left his lungs. Madness. He’d waited long enough for the mustard seed to take root. The world couldn’t be moist with the presence of God and a desert void and mechanistic—and yet each embrace came with its own repudiation. He’d fingered the sore, worked to death a million reasons why it didn’t make a damn bit of difference, but he knew that was bullshit. You could blather on about the power of myth and the reifying nature of language, but in the end, in this world, either the wounds in the woman’s palms were there or not, self-inflicted or not. Either the author of the universe was watching him right now—or not.

Duval excels at portraying the fundamental instability of modern man, with a longing for his Creator and Savior inscribed on his heart, but condemned to make his own way by his own lights. Mayhew is the everyman of this day and age who has a residual affection for one Christian tradition or another, but feels that it is somehow, for some reason, impossible in this day and age to really believe. Mayhew’s search for the girl with stigmata turns him into a Thomas, who must see for himself. Maybe this is what it takes for God to capture the attention of a man like Mayhew?

By now, the Christ-haunted secular modern man is something of a cliché, but as Duval shows, one that can be made vivid and new. Even aside from the religious question, Mayhew’s identity is unstable in just about every other respect. He has the modern traveler’s vanity: “Yet he wanted them to know he wasn’t like the other Americans they’d met. For some reason it seemed important to prove this to these strangers.” There is even the question built into his name: May Hew?

As Mayhew descends further into dissipation, the storytelling turns magical-realist. Mayhew’s casual chess opponent, whom he nicknames Ruy Lopez, suddenly speaks perfect English and appears to be in on a plot by his employer to extract him back to America. The boy who procures his video camera seems to glow in the dark.

How Mayhew treats the Blessed Sacrament that he receives each day is obscene and blasphemous from a doctrinal perspective, but in the context of his life it shows a certain humility. It seems that Mayhew may be on the verge of finding his faith, at the cost of the life he knew in America. But did Christ not say to drop everything, even our nearest and dearest, even wife and child, to follow Him?

“Strange Mercies” is a remarkable addition to the literature of obsession and also a rare entry into the strangely (perhaps understandably) under-explored territory of pornography addiction—daily Mass and daily indulgence being part of Mayhew’s routine. Duval is content to leave loose ends untied, and I began to wonder, among other things, what the priest in “Strange Mercies” thought of the foreign newcomer to his sparsely attended weekday Masses. It felt as though there was a rush to finish what could have easily become a profoundly interesting full-length novel.

In the shorter stories in The Deposition, Duval comes up with scenarios on the edge of plausibility that resolve only into expanding resonances. In “Sinkhole” a group of Protestants becomes obsessed with a fetus preserved in a jar on sale at a local curiosity shop, but is it real? In the title story, a hitchhiking priest asks the driver to shoot him in an Iowa soy field. A suburban father begins a dialogue with a coyote in “Meat.”

Duval’s prose is professional American literary, polished and burnished with the solvents and wipes of the workshop. Duval takes few stylistic risks. He makes up for this with plot and thematic ambiguity. In nearly all of the stories, the endings slip and slide in perspective, operating in the spaces between hallucination, vision, and revelation, allowing interpretation. I wondered what a non-religious reader would make of them. Duval allows questions to linger, in a nod to the dynamic resonances of faith and doubt where pretending and praying converge and wanting collapses into believing.