Marvel and a Wonder (Akashic) is not the first novel I’ve read that is either directly or indirectly about American masculinity in crisis, nor will it be the last, but it’s the only one I’ve genuinely enjoyed. It’s a notable accomplishment: a melancholy, symbol-laden meditation on the dying American heartland that I stayed up into the small hours to finish.
There’s also racism. No one knows who Quentin’s father was, but they know he wasn’t white. Quentin’s “a halfie, or a mulatto, or what the grandfather had sometimes been known to call a mix-breed, though that wasn’t the right word either.” Being the only nonwhite kid in a small Indiana town is not easy for him. It’s also complicated for Jim, who, unbeknownst to Quentin, was dishonorably discharged from the army for assaulting a black soldier. It’s hard not to see the fact that a white, historically racist farmer is passing on his family name and crumbling legacy to a biracial teenager that he doesn’t understand as a metaphor for everything happening to the midwest right now, but like I said, it’s a symbol-laden book, and they just keep coming.
In an author’s statement, Meno wrote that this book is in response to what he sees as “the end of one kind of America and the beginning of another.” Jim Falls is a dying breed, and Marvel and a Wonder explores the good and the bad of what we’ll lose when that breed dies.
