Electric God - Complete Reviews

 THE DENVER POST

Truly exceptional books are about human connection. Writers like Catherine Ryan Hyde understand that.

Such writers search their hearts for universal truths and weave them into their stories. Like parents, they nurse and nurture their creations until they take on energy of their own, then deliver them to an uncertain destiny.

"Electric God," Ryan Hyde's exceptional follow-up to "Pay It Forward" (Simon & Schuster), is much more than a welcome arrival. It is a full-fledged blessed event.

Called "a contemporary reinterpretation" of the Bible's book of Job, "Electric God" chronicles three distinctive phases of Hayden Reese's unpredictable life. We meet 54-year-old Reese as he buries one of his dearest and only friends - a hound named Jenny. The impulses of passion have left him weary, uncertain and very nearly alone.

"Hayden Reese picked his way on foot in the dark, straight uphill into national forest territory, his Jenny dangling heavy on his right shoulder," Ryan Hyde writes on page one. "Still supple she felt, and almost warm. His only little bit of comfort." After seven chapters and a cliffhanger climax -
as we clearly grasp the sometimes violent downward spiral of Reese's struggle - Ryan Hyde masterfully guides us back in time to Book Two, an insightful look at another Hayden Reese.

Like voyeurs, we see a medical student, loving husband and devoted father struck like lightning by loss. We see a boyish Reese who blames himself for the abuse and torment that came before. The layers of pain he must endure are now so obviously crippling. His chronic anger begins to make sense.

"Nine days later Hayden was placed on a bus in chains," Ryan Hyde writes after Reese is convincted of beating his 16-year-old daughter's sexually predatory first date into a coma. "He stared out through the barred windows, all the way to the state pen, La Casa Grande, the man in the next seat called it. He watched the drivers of neighboring cars avert their eyes.

"He served the first five months of his time there learning to survive. Wondering at what point exactly he had let his life get away. Looking back, trying to pinpoint the moment.

"He never quite succeeded in narrowing it down. The more he looked back on his life, the more it seemed like something that had never exactly belonged to him.

"He spent the first five months of his time there without visitors of any kind." Book Three weaves the consequences of Reese's complicated life together. Like the best of magicians, Ryan Hyde pulls a rabbit out of her hat - a flawlessly plotted surprise ending that satisfies and swells with
hope and unquestionable relief.

Catherine Ryan Hyde is a magnificent storyteller, an expert at plot and pacing and voice. But it is her protagonist, Hayden Reese, who makes "Electric God" a classic in the truest possible sense.

At every turn, Ryan Hyde endows Reese with the perfect balance of imperfections. Because he displays a remarkable blend of weaknesses and strengths, he becomes more than a "character." At his best, Hayden Reese is a bonafide hero. But even at his worst, he is so tender of heart, we can't help but care.

If there is a literary deity, elegantly poised on an editorial throne, it is undoubtedly smiling. Because Ryan Hyde's "Electric God" is the answer to a prayer - a heroic, superbly crafted novel worth reading again and again and again.
--Kelly Milner Halls

The San Francisco Chronicle, December 31, 2000

A Defeated Man Looks to Have a Fistfight With God

In the past, literature's great craftsmen -- Dickens, George Eliot, Robert Penn Warren -- not only took on the great tragedies of everyday life, but also readily tackled the redemption that followed. Today, happy endings, unless contrived by Hollywood, are out of vogue (except for the inspirational field), and novelists too often shy away from salvation in favor of shock value.

In this, Catherine Ryan Hyde is an exception. Her second novel, "Electric God" (like her first, "Pay It Forward"), is a modern allegory of classic proportion. It's the story of 54-year-old Hayden Reese, a brusque, emotional, lonely man who, as his life proceeds, increasingly expresses his anger through violence.

The book opens as Hayden is rapidly spiraling toward the nadir of his life. His dog has died, his mistress is returning to her husband, he holds no set job and his best friend is the town sheriff, with whom he plays chess through the bars of his cell during his regular sojourns in jail. Yet for all that, Ryan Hyde convinces us to forgive him. She describes, in prose so straightforward it almost disappears from the page, an inner landscape that reveals Hayden as a decent man, caring and upright, if overly short-tempered.

Divided into different sections of Hayden's life, the novel jumps from the present back to his early marriage to Judith, when they were both medical students very much in love and their daughter, Allegra, was just a toddler. These are Hayden's happiest days, when he is working too hard and maybe loving too hard.

The novel then jumps back again, this time to Hayden's childhood. He is living with his parents and feels a deep sense of responsibility for his gifted younger brother, yet it seems an arid household, devoid of any real tenderness. His father in particular is unfair and demanding, teaching him rigidity as well as guilt.

Hayden seems almost like different men during these two periods in his life, so separate are they in his conscience. Even Judith doesn't really know him, because he remains completely silent to her about his past.

The only constant seems to be the specter of God, drilled into him in Bible classes at school: a God with huge power but no heart, who haunts him at every emotional turn. When tragedy strikes and his son dies at birth, Hayden can hear God's derisive laugh, much as he believes Jonah must have heard it, and resorts to his fists to ease the pain.

"You want to have a fistfight with God, is that it?" asks a priest, after watching Hayden attack a stained glass window behind the church altar.

"If He had the guts to come down and face me, yes," Hayden answers.

"You think if God came down to be with you now, He would strike you with His fists?"

"I think He already has," Hayden says.

Ryan Hyde writes easily from the perspective of a man, and also about God, particularly the tales of Job and Jonah, without sounding either sanctimonious or acidic. As Hayden loses his way, first in his profession and then in his marriage, Ryan Hyde succeeds at keeping at bay both our disdain and our pity.

At each unexpected turn of this gripping novel, a new side of Hayden's character comes into focus, as though illuminated by lightning. Hayden is no hero, but we come to understand him because his motivations are not so different from our own. When, without a trace of artifice, Ryan Hyde offers him a reprieve at the end, we willingly accept.

"Electric God" is a complex, tightly constructed novel of genuine pathos, yet its tone is deceptively light, as though it were poking fun at the very concept of allegory. Constructed as three "books" of seven chapters apiece, the chapter headings themselves are ironic riddles that become clear only after the reader has finished each chapter's last page.

Even the title, with its strange joining of modern and ancient power, remains opaque until the last. "Electric God" is nonetheless very much a modern allegory about love. "The trick is to love somebody who'll actually do you some good," as someone tells Hayden. "That's the part hardly anybody gets right." Whether it's about himself or the women he chooses or the shape of his God, Hayden comes to realize that, if he is to survive, he must love that which does him well.

Ryan Hyde spins her tale so effortlessly that the reader closes the book with a quiet sense of elation, and only later notices that "Electric God" is still there etched on the psyche, like the imprint of a lightning bolt upon the eye.
--Roxane Farmanfarmaian

PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY PW FORECASTS October 16, 2000

CATHERINE RYAN HYDE, Simon & Schuster, $23 (320p) ISBN 0-7432-1118-9 Hayden Reese has never cried. Not when his younger brother died 36 years ago, not when his son died at birth, not even when, 15 years ago, he ended up in jail for assaulting his daughter's boyfriend and lost his wife and family. In Hyde's (Pay It Forward) latest novel of redemption and forgiveness, 50-year-old Hayden is a present-day Job, living alone in a little cabin in Northern California, reading the Tao Te Ching and attempting to control the violent outbursts that have plagued him all his life. Just as he thinks he has touched bottom, his girlfriend, Laurel, returns to her husband, whom Hayden beats up, getting shot and almost killed for his pains. In the hospital, Hayden is tended to by a feisty lady surgeon, and gets a second chance to reconcile with his past and set a new direction for the future. The natural cadences of Hyde's prose; her clever, realistic dialogue; her sharp descriptions of hard-scrabble country; and her warm humor raise the novel.to the level of a complex tale of one man's struggle to make sense of life. Inspirational rather than preachy or sentimental, the book wields the emotional power to be expected from a story of family, dogs, justice and self-reliance. (Dec.) .

Forecast: The publication of Electric God coincides with the release of a major film based on Pay It Forward, starring Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt and Haley Joel Osment. If the film makes a splash, look for Pay It Forward to land on paperback bestseller lists (the mass market was released by Pocket October 3), with Electric God tugged toward hardcover lists in its wake.

Published Sunday, November 5, 2000, in the San Jose Mercury News

In the belly of the whale

A modern Jonah struggles to overcome a life of loss and resentment
BY MARK JOHNSON

Because nobody could miss the fuss for ``Pay It Forward,'' the film made from Catherine Ryan Hyde's last novel, it made a lot of sense to time her new book now. But ``Electric God'' does not seem a likely candidate for a screenplay. It's simply a thought-provoking, original and honest novel.

Its publicists describe the Cambria author's novel as a ``contemporary reinterpretation of the book of Job.'' It's not quite so straightforward as that. Hayden Reese has, like Job, apparently lost everything dear to him. He lost a son in childbirth, a wife and daughter to estrangement. He has served time in prison, and he is about to serve a jail sentence for yet another act of angry poor judgment. When we meet him, he is on his way to bury the last creature he was close to -- his dog. A few chapters later, his girlfriend's husband shoots him.

Through flashbacks, we see Hayden's rage accumulate through a series of crises beginning in childhood. He is no Job, however. Job was a God-worshiping man whose troubles were created by God, but who never lost faith. Hayden more resembles another biblical figure: Jonah, who was cut off from human society by his anger -- righteous anger at the injustice of God. ``I do well to be angry, even unto death,'' Jonah declared. That is Hayden Reese's anger. And when we meet him, he is in the belly of the whale, pinched and bitter and alone. By book's end, he will be vomited forth, as was Jonah. And where will he be then?

Hyde crafts her story with great skill. Hayden is a dangerous, erratic figure, but we can see gentleness, suffering and charm alongside. His rage appears inexplicable, out of proportion, until Hyde peels away the layers of his life and we understand the sources of it. But Hayden would have only contempt for our empathy. ``Why?'' he demands, and he would shake the universe itself, if he could, for an answer.

There's a word, theodicy, that refers to the study of the justice of God in the light of human suffering. I had a philosophy professor once whose answer to the question, ``Why is there evil?'' was, ``Why not?'' For Hayden, however, this is not an academic inquiry but a war, waged in blood and tears.

The ``Electric God'' is a Christian god, but this novel should have a broader appeal than to believers. There are no angels or miracles here. There is no glibness, no cant, no instant salvation. It is a novel of struggle, of small gains hard won. It has its share of great scenes, some of them comic and some not. I think anyone who reads it will remember the incident of the pennies on the tower -- I won't say any more -- for a long time. MARK JOHNSON reviews popular fiction the first Sunday of each month. Contact him at mjohnson@fea.net.

Library Journal, November 1, 2000

Hyde, Catherine Ryan Electric God.
S&S Nov 2000. 320p ISBN 0-7432-1118-9 $23

Hayden Reese seems a modern Job, and no wonder--at 50, he has lost virtually everything that ever mattered to him, and he's clinging to life after being shot by an angry husband whose wife he loved. His troubles began early. In his mid-teens, Hayden was powered by hatred for his cruel and irrational father and burdened with guilt over the death of his younger brother. In the early years of his marriage his losses continued, some of them exacerbated by Hayden himself, a big, powerful man whose fear makes him mean and whose fists alone can do dreadful damage. Well schooled in the Bible, Hayden finds parallels with Jonah as well, as he wrestles with a higher power who tests him harshly. Eventually, Hayden comes to terms with God and finds the greatest heroism in the act of forgiveness. In Hayden Reese, Hyde has created an exceptionally complex and unforgettable character, and she tells his story skillfully in remarkably clean, economical prose. A worthy successor to Pay It Forward, this should meet with the same success, especially in the light of the film version of the previous book. --Michele Leber

Of few days, and full of trouble ... and laughs By Ron Charles

Advance publicity for Catherine Ryan Hyde's "Electric God" claims that it's a modern retelling of Job.

I should think that's hardly a selling point. After all, most country-western music is a modern retelling of Job, but that allusion doesn't sell records. (e.g. "My dog dieth, my truck breaketh, and my honey she leaveth me.")

Yes, Hyde has constructed her novel around biblical themes of tragedy and forgiveness, but "Electric God" is also one of the most entertaining novels I've read this year. Imagine if Fanny Flagg had written the Old Testament.

(The book won't appear in stores till later this fall when a movie based on Hyde's previous novel, "Pay It Forward," opens in theaters.)

At the start of "Electric God," Hayden Reese is having a pretty bad 50th birthday: He doesn't have a job. His family is gone. His girlfriend dumps him. And yes, his dog dies.

The baby opossum he finds by the highway is suddenly the most important thing in his miserable world. Something visceral is obviously working on Hayden. His need to care for helpless creatures is so strong that he breaks the vet's jaw when the opossum dies.

In fact, Hayden's temper has broken just about everything. Convinced God doesn't have the guts to show His face, over the years Hayden has beaten a variety of people close to death.

The sheriff, his only real friend, shakes his head: "Seems like you've had more than your fair share of trouble."

"Seems like," Hayden answers.

"Some'd say you bring a lot of it on yourself, though. There'd be those who might reason you're practically out there looking for all the trouble you can lay in store."

"I hope I never have to meet them and hear it for myself, then."

"Oh, they're all around you, Hayden. It's just, nobody's quite so sure of you as to say a thing like that to your face."

"You just did."

"I got you cuffed, though."

"Anybody can have a bad day."

In fact, Hayden's bad day has been going on for 15 years. The novel's middle section jumps back to 1971 when Hayden, his wife, and their little girl are enjoying a busy, happy life. They hardly have the riches of Job, but his wife is in medical school and their daughter is at that age of almost unbelievable cuteness.

Then, in a moment of wrenching tragedy, their domestic bliss is derailed. Hyde's story-telling style, always brisk, can knock the wind out of you. In the wake of this accident, Hayden prays, but nobody answers. The complexity of his grief makes all that well-meaning advice about "getting on with it" sound cruel and silly. He questions a priest, but canned references to the unquestionable ways of God don't bring him any solace. "I have always hated the book of Job," he admits.

When the story jumps back further to Hayden's childhood, we discover that his anger has even deeper roots. He was raised by a brutal fundamentalist who should have heard the echo of Jacob and Esau in the way he cruelly favored one son over the other. Finally, a clever twist of the Cain and Abel story leaves Hayden hating himself for failing to save his self-destructive brother from the wrath of the "electric God."

Highlighting these biblical allusions, though, may give the wrong impression. There's nothing heavy handed or scriptural about this engaging novel. Hyde stays carefully out of the way, letting the characters' dialogue carry the story whenever possible. The effect is surprisingly charming, sad, and sweet. The ingredients of even her most sentimental moments are so pure they rarely seem manipulative.

The last section of the book brings us back to the present as Hayden completes his descent into the ash pit. During a shoving match with his girlfriend's husband, he runs up against an opponent he can't beat into submission. When he wakes up after a 10-week coma with a chest full of buckshot, he finally starts to consider God's rhetorical question to Jonah, "Doest thou well to be so angry?"

From this point on, his mental reconstruction is more painful than any physical therapy he has to endure. Having lived a life founded on anger and self-righteous hatred, Hayden finds himself limping uneasily toward forgiveness. No audible answers come from on high, but answers do slowly come.

Hyde has some nerve to reach back to such an ancient, existential myth while plunging forward with a sweet story like this one. But, of course, it takes guts to question that whirlwind.

Not to give anything away, but the Lord blessed the latter end of Hayden more than his beginning. When they're through with "Electric God," readers are likely to feel the same way.

From The Baltimore Sun

Catherine Ryan Hyde already knows how Hollywood works: her last novel, the hanky-fest "Pay It Forward," had a major movie deal before it found a publisher. But "Electric God" (Simon and Schuster, 318 pages, $23) is a considerably stronger piece of work. Gritty and full of surprises, it is openly inspirational but not cloying.

Hayden Reese is fond of hurting people because he likes the way it feels, yet he's described by his mother as "the most deep-down oddly emotional boy anybody'd ever met. Just no tears." Twenty pages into the book and he's already buried his dog, broken the jaw of a near-stranger and had words with his girlfriend's husband. As if that weren't bad enough, he's already lost his little brother, wife, daughter and unborn son. Do the tears ultimately flow? Does Reese find redemption?

You don't have to brush up on your Old Testament to figure that one out, but you'll marvel at how the passage is made with humor and a marked lack of sentimentality.

-Elizabeth Teachout

Life's trials shock man in absorbing 'Electric God'
By MICHAEL HOPKINS
Special to the Journal Sentinel
Last Updated: Nov. 10, 2000

Electric God. By Catherine Ryan Hyde. Simon and Schuster. 320 pages. $23.

Life can be very unfair and very hard, driving some men to their knees in prayer, causing others to shake an angry fist at heaven or challenge the very existence of God.

In her latest novel, "Electric God," Catherine Ryan Hyde tells a modern parable, exploring one man's struggle to come to terms with the troublesome hand life deals him.

Hyde, whose previous novel, "Pay It Forward," was made into a major motion picture, opens up timeless questions about the ultimate goodness and omnipotence of God in light of man's suffering.

In many ways, "Electric God" is a contemporary interpretation of the biblical book of Job, augmented with situations that are philosophically analogous to Jonah's journey through the whale.

The story follows the life of Hayden Reese, a man suffering from great personal tragedy complicated by an inability to keep his violent tendencies in check. Like Job, he loses, in diverse ways, his property, his family and eventually his health.

Reese is a deliciously complex character, a 50-year-old with a hot temper and mysteriously guarded past. But he is a paradox, crusty and bitter on one hand, soft and helpful on the other. It is within the first chapter that we find the template for his life: bad things happen through natural causes, and he vents his anger and sorrow with his fists.

We initially join him in a private moment of emotional vulnerability, burying his dead hound dog. By splitting the novel into three sections, each covering a different developmental period in Reese's life, Hyde gradually reveals the driving forces behind his seemingly irrational choices. This cleverly causes readers to shift their paradigms about him.

The first part has Reese enmeshed in a tangle of relationships.

Laurel, his love, has returned to her husband to attempt a reconciliation. On Laurel's request, Reese successfully tracks down and retrieves her runaway 16-year-old daughter, Peg, whom Reese finds working in a brothel.

When they return, Laurel wants to rekindle their physical passion; Reese gives in - and suffers the consequences.

The middle of the book follows Reese as a teenager, living with his caring mother and overly strict father.

His father thinks little of Reese's potential for anything other than caring for his younger brother, Daniel. But one day, Reese fails to meet his foolishly adventurous brother, a failure of tragic consequences which haunt Reese relentlessly.

It's from this incident that Reese develops his early picture of God as electricity: ever-present, silent and able to strike coldly.

Tragedy dogs Reese.

At 20 he has a loving wife and a daughter they adore. But things go wrong with their second child - and Reese flies into a rage-filled depression. Years later, his temper ruins his relationship with his daughter.

The last third of the book finds Reese facing a myriad of choices when presented with surprising opportunities to reclaim his losses.

Hyde crafts her story well, letting paragraphs and chapters work as vivid, moving pictures. The book is a quick, enthralling read, yet provides grist for deep thought.

In the end, Hyde offers a hopeful picture: humanity's ability to fix its broken state by turning to the forgiveness inherent in a loving higher power.

--Michael Hopkins

Book Review Electric God
Baton Rouge, Louisiana Advocate

When an author's work is made into a movie by Hollywood, the tendency is to rush out and produce another novel as quickly as possible and ride the wave of fame for all it is worth.

This seems to be the case with Catherine Ryan Hyde as she follows up Pay It Forward with the Electric God. While many novels that come after great success seem to pale in comparison, Hyde's newest work is a blessing. She takes a seemingly marginal character, the local recluse with the propensity for rage and violence and introduces us to a complicated individual. Her protagonist, Hayden Reese appears to be a man who is of less than average intelligence and is down on his luck.

The novel is set in a small northern Californian town where, saddened by the loss of his dog and closest friend, Reese's life takes a turn for the worse. He loses his girlfriend to her husband, a baby possum that he rescues is put to sleep by the local veterinarian instead of being saved as Reese has asked the vet to do, and he loses his job. Violent outbursts are his only means of dealing with his disappointment and Hyde's descriptions of Hayden's feelings of release when his arm is sailing through the air toward its intended victim, allow the reader to understand the depth of the rage deep within this man.

Hyde, an accomplished short story writer, uses her talent well here as she melds a succession of short stories together into a full--length work. She weaves religious imagery into her eloquent but simple text and uses the biblical story of Job to make Reese into a tragic hero who champions all that is good, but somehow gets it wrong. The use of this tale as the structure for the novel imparts a deeper meaning to all the actions within the text and slowly her novel becomes the ship being lashed about the sea by the waves. On the surface Reese is a child--man who sees the world in terms of good and bad. His fate is predetermined by his intellect. But Hyde peels away the protective layer of ignorance slowly throughout the work revealing a man of great intellect and moral torment whose emotional growth was stunted as a child. This work is imbued with hope as well as despair and is a wonderful piece of literature.

--Tracey Kimbrell