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Twins
By Mike Palecek
Waubesa Press, 2003. 330 pages.
The teachings of Jesus are challenging to follow. The English educator A. S. Neill (of Summerhill fame, or infamy, depending on your point of view), a passionate atheist, made the memorable remark “The first and last Christian died on the cross.” That’s certainly an overstatement, for during the past two thousand years a significant number of people have lived and died upholding values based in the teachings of Jesus: teachings about justice and forgiveness and inclusion and greed and so forth. At same time, an even more significant number of people, perhaps millions upon millions, have claimed to live Christian lives while ignoring those teachings about justice and forgiveness and inclusion and greed. Some of those millions have even distorted the teachings so as to help themselves achieve evil, selfish, even imperialistic ends.
Go figure.
It’s as if the teachings of Jesus have an evil twin.
There are twins all over this novel by Mike Palacek: Minneapolis and St. Paul, a.k.a. the Twin Cities; the Minnesota Twins baseball team and its own odd twin-pair, the memory of Metropolitan Stadium and the reality of the Metrodome; and a pair of twin brothers, Jerry and Gerald Mars. Jerry is a revolutionary Catholic priest who literally robs from the rich and gives to the poor. Gerald is the warden of a federal penitentiary in downtown Minneapolis who runs the big house without regard for the rule of law and due process (habeus corpus, anyone?) and aspires to be Minnesota’s next governor on the strength of his ability to maintain law and order.
Published in 2003 and thus a post-9/11 novel, Twins can easily be seen as an extended comment on Bush administration policies in which personal freedoms and Constitutional rights are given short shrift in favor of the maintenance of global law and order. Gerald is the ultimate bad guy. He runs his prison with no regard for individual rights and manipulates the people around him as if they were slaves. He readily presumes the guilt of others and where it does not exist he manufactures it. The term “brotherly love” means nothing to him — not in terms of the wider world or of his own brother.
Jerry, on the other hand, is committed to an understanding of the Gospel that is at best justly socialistic and at worst idealistically naïve. Unlike his brother, though, the impetus behind his convictions is not personal gain but the call of Jesus to turn things upside down, free the captives, forgive debt, declare jubilee. Jerry’s memorable Easter sermon concludes,
Don’t seek to live so damned long that you finally have to be unplugged. Make the bastards come get you — make their terrible plans, hunt you down and fill you full of holes, just as they did our Lord Jesus Christ. And take that chance. The chance taken by Jesus the skinny guy with no money, no family, no friends, no career — no papers or books published — with only this one desperation shot at redemption, with one card to play that might mean he would ever amount to something. Take the chance that God is God.
A typical declaration from Gerald, on the other hand, goes like this: “You are nothing. I own this city. You cannot win.”
The sympathies of the author Mike Palacek are quite clearly with Jerry and his compadres, as evidenced by the subtlety and nuance with which they are drawn. Gerald comes a bit too close to being a straw man but his saved by the fact that he is imbued with the kind of political power that certain kinds of human animals have always been able acquire and flaunt; he is ultimately realistic despite the amount of symbolism that he embodies. Palacek takes the simmering conflict between Jerry and Gerald and slowly turns up the gas as Minneapolis and St. Paul come to a page-turning boil. It ain’t over till it’s over, and the author does not tip his hand as to whether evil or good will prove triumphant. Nor will I.
Side notes:
1. Palacek shows a different side of his ability in a chapter devoted to two old men, Hank Blazek and Sy Shinder. Hank and Sy have no real connection to the main plot; they are a sportscaster and sportswriter, lifelong friends, who spend the days leading up to Twins games driving around Lake Harriet, stopping for coffee, and visiting their wives’ side-by-side graves. Their chapter is essentially a related short story that could stand alone and is worth reading for its own merits. As an element of this novel it is of minimal importance, but provides a break in the action that is Keillor-esque and lovely.
2. I attended a lot of baseball games at the Metrodome during the years I lived in Minnesota, and was quite tickled by the utter accuracy of this statement by Palacek’s narrator. In reference to the Dome, “the worst baseball stadium in the history of the major leagues,” he writes:
But here the symbiotic culture [of the Twin Cities] came together — the strong theater background of the populace allowed them to employ suspension of disbelief and not view the Metrodome straight on — but with oblique eyes, looking slightly askance, not seeing if for what it was, but for what the playwright meant it to be.
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