Colossus
By Ross Barkan
Arcade Publishing, 288 pages, $29.99
The American dream, according to Slavoj Žižek, amounts to “dematerialization” of real life as it becomes a “spectral show.” In this regard, claims Žižek, the “fake purity” of the fundamentalist preachers who “turned out to be secret sexual perverts,” is less a sign of their hypocrisy than of their consistency—their sticking to the artificiality of American life.
This American attempt to transcend the limitations of the real, dressed in language of culture war and religious fervor, is at the heart of Ross Barkan’s fourth novel, Colossus. Its protagonist is Teddy Starr, the pastor of an evangelical Protestant church in a small town in the Midwest. Pastor Starr harps on the evils of the godless left, with its sexual libertinism and cultural Marxism, while several proverbial skeletons hang in his closet. Predictably, these include adulterous affairs with several members of his flock—which he has managed to morally justify.