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Overview
From the critically acclaimed author of The Last of Her Kind, a breakout novel that imagines the aftermath of pandemic flu, as seen through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old boy uncertain of his destiny.
His family's sole survivor after a flu pandemic has killed large numbers of people worldwide, Cole Vining is lucky to have found refuge with the evangelical Pastor Wyatt and his wife in a small town in southern Indiana. As the world outside has grown increasingly anarchic, Salvation City has been spared much of the devastation, and its residents have renewed their preparations for the Rapture.
Grateful for the shelter and love of his foster family (and relieved to have been saved from the horrid, overrun orphanages that have sprung up around the country), Cole begins to form relationships within the larger community. But despite his affection for this place, he struggles with memories of the very different world in which he was reared. Is there room to love both Wyatt and his parents? Are they still his parents if they are no longer there? As others around him grow increasingly fixated on the hope of salvation and the new life to come through the imminent Rapture, Cole begins to conceive of a different future for himself, one in which his own dreams of heroism seem within reach.
Written in Sigrid Nunez's deceptively simple style, Salvation City is a story of love, betrayal, and forgiveness, weaving the deeply affecting story of a young boy's transformation with a profound meditation on the meaning of belief and heroism.
Editorials
Abraham Verghese
Nunez tells a fine tale, avoiding clichés and providing powerful insights. To our surprise, we are drawn equally to the Wyatt family and to Cole's dead parents…By the end of this satisfying, provocative and very plausible novel, Cole doesn't believe that the world is about to end. Instead "he saw himself living a long time and going many places and doing many different things. 'Your whole life ahead of you'—never more than just an expression before—now came to him with the ring of a blessing."—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
The intellectually rigorous and grimly prophetic latest from Nunez (The Last of Her Kind) initially resembles any number of coming-of-age yarns, except that most adolescences don't coincide with apocalyptic flu pandemics and the rise of insular church-cities. Cole Vining, however, is not so fortunate: already struggling with a relocation from Chicago to penny-ante Indiana and the mystery of sexual desire, the near destruction of the human race (Cole's parents among them) launches Cole into a rudderless future of nightmarish orphanages and angelic "rapture children." Rescued by the charismatic and deceptive Pastor Wyatt, Cole is brought to Salvation City, a Christian Mission closed off from the crumbling world. There, Cole's education will resume with religious indoctrination in place of his parents' secular cynicism, and his evolving sense of self will collide with the corruption and hypocrisy lurking beneath Salvation's sanctified facade. The great success of Nunez's book is that the end of the world is filtered through Cole's imperfect perspective, so that the collapse of society is no more devastating than first love, and deeply felt conflict rages as a young man tries to find something worth preserving in a place determined to obliterate the past. (Sept)From the Publisher
"The great success of Nunez's book is that the end of the world is filtered through Cole's imperfect perspective, so that the collapse of society is no more devastating than first love, and deeply felt conflict rages as a young man tries to find something worth preserving in a place determined to obliterate the past. " —-Publishers WeeklyLibrary Journal
When a flu pandemic wipes out most of the population, teenager Cole Vining is adopted by the pastor of a small evangelical community in southern Indiana. As Cole's parents had been atheists, he finds his new life—which involves lots of prayer, Bible study, and anticipation of the Rapture—pretty disorienting. He is eventually tracked down by his aunt, who, appalled at his conservative environment, offers him a much different life, giving him some serious choices to make. Narrator Stephen Hoye shines in his portrayals of the characters, especially the charismatic Pastor Wyatt. But while the slow-motion apocalypse that unfolds in PEN/Hemingway Award nominee Nunez's (www.sigridnunez.com) sixth novel is well told, the outcome following some extended Christian soul-searching may trouble certain listeners, limiting its appeal. A marginal purchase. [The Riverhead: Penguin Group (USA) hc was described as being similar to but "lighter" than Cormac McCarthy's The Road and was recommended for YA readers as well as fans of medical thrillers, LJ 8/10.—Ed.]—John Hiett, Iowa City P.L.Kirkus Reviews
An adolescent orphan finds a home with an evangelical Christian community after his parents perish in an influenza pandemic, in the latest from Nunez (The Last of Her Kind, 2005, etc.).
In this not-so-unfathomable scenario, the American health-care system is woefully ill-equipped to cope with a long-predicted worldwide influenza outbreak. Caught in the chaos are Serena and Miles Vining, bourgeois-bohemian academics forced to leave Chicago for Indiana when Miles couldn't get tenure. Their only son Cole has had a secular upbringing—Miles and Serena scorn fundamentalism of all stripes. When "panflu" suddenly overtakes their small town, Miles dies at home, and after several days of delirium Cole awakens in a hospital, only to learn that his mother has died, as well as his only other next-of-kin, Serena's twin sister Addy, who lived in Berlin. He's sent to an orphanage (the sheer number of newly parentless children has revived the need for such institutions) dominated by bullies right out ofLord of the Flies, one of many books Cole had refused to read, much to his parents' disappointment. Rescued by Pastor Wyatt, a reformed alcoholic turned charismatic minister of a Christian enclave called Salvation City, Cole adjusts gradually to drastically different guardians: PW and his wife Tracy, like most Salvation City families, practice home schooling and exalt only one text, the Bible. Cole is surrounded by endearing born-again characters: Boots, a local radio host, Mason, a disfigured former skinhead with a heart of gold, and Starlyn, Tracy's jailbait niece, considered a "rapture child" marked for early ascension into heaven. Although Salvation City is on full Apocalyptic alert, Cole's domestic life with PW and Tracy is distinctly less fraught than with his parents. (Serena and Miles were divorce-bound; PW and Tracy never fight.) When Addy, not dead after all, arrives from Germany to claim him, Cole has to choose between diametrically opposed social milieus—no longer such a clear choice.
Class, not cure, is Nunez's preoccupation, and she handles it with fine-tuned irony and no small measure of profundity.