Reviewed by Lindsey Highfield
Despite differing in fan bases and aesthetics, priests, politicians, cult leaders, and writers all make up the same profession. Trying to get people to believe something. And it’s a much easier job than you would think. Flat earthers are still alive and well, 500 years after Copernicus proposed his theory of a heliocentric solar system. Chicagoans trekked to Wrigley Field for over a hundred years, no World Series in sight, but still believing, every year, that they would finally succeed. The much harder task? To convince people NOT to believe in something. People would much rather watch a world ending meteor arc across the sky than admit they were wrong about it being Doomsday. And somehow by the end of The High Heaven, Wheeler has convinced his characters, and perhaps his reader, to not believe one of the most universal truths: whether or not the Moon exists.
The premise of belief, and the different and contrasting ones we pick up over the course of our lives is central to Joshua Wheeler’s debut novel The High Heaven, where his protagonist, Izzy Gently is born into a New Mexico cult and spends the rest of her life embracing aspects of her upbringing and trying to deprogram other parts, namely the botched resurrection the cult attempts with Izzy’s mother, and the belief that Jesus will come back to Earth through a spaceship. But Izzy is never able to escape the cult’s lens towards the world which manifests through her fascination with space.
The High Heaven is situated in the genre of historical fiction, with a particular interest in the American Space Race, but it is very often absurd and surrealist in its very depictions of local color and realism; to Wheeler, the realistic view of American culture is that it is absurd. The prose is at times blunt and crass, but at others wide reaching and philosophical, veering into the territory of poetry. Sometimes all of these disparate tones can be found in a single sentence; “She’d gone half a lifetime trying to traverse the state of Texas, the backwards way, meaning against the flow of the nation’s destiny, whatever that was, away from enchantment, meaning also backwards like an idiot rich in fuckups.”
Wheeler uses the expansive backdrop of the American space race and the metonic cycle of the moon to mark important stages in his character’s lives, from successes like Apollo 13, tragedies alla Columbia and the Challenger explosion, and what new endeavours towards space travel like the Artemis expeditions mean for Izzy’s life, and American culture as a whole. Lunar exploration is hopeful and unrealistic by definition, American Manifest Destiny at its broadest extreme, and yet it often rears its head when Americans feel their most hopeless; after the devastation of World War II, the doom of Mutually Assured Destruction in the Cold War, and the bloody realities of the Vietnam War; after all, exploring other planets, “Other space” as Izzy calls it, means abandoning Earth’s future.
As for the writing itself, it’s just as ambitious as the novel’s plot; Wheeler sections the book into three different genres, Neo-Western, Picaresque, and Southern Gothic, to portray different chapters and locales of his characters, as they slowly navigate eastward across the United States; from the isolated and alien landscape of New Mexico, to the oil-rig studded Texas, and finally to the vibrant, but disillusioned city of New Orleans twenty years after Katrina. Wheeler’s characters each have their own unique quirks and philosophies that rub off on Izzy: She learns ways to distance herself from her emotions from the cold, disillusioned rancher Oliver Gently, using the phrase “one time the moon” to express her feelings. “One time the moon was a child hiking up a mountain in the wind…The moon could not make her eyes shut off…The moon was alone.” She learns how to scam and stoke other’s beliefs and egos from her addled geologist friend she refers to as the “kookhunter”, and she believes her fate is visible in the geography of her irises, if only she knew what it was.
Joshua Wheeler’s The High Heaven is full of unique images. Images that last in the reader’s, and his character’s minds; his characters are wholly aware of the symbolism injected in their own lives, and undergo the same process that his readers do: trying to connect parts of their life, or Wheeler’s writing, and prescribe a meaning towards it. A space monkey crashing back to earth. The white gypsum sands of New Mexico, that aren’t white or sand. A stolen Rolls-Royce Corniche topped with the Spirit of Ecstasy. Dozens of different types of televisions, and the eternal man that occupies them, Walter Cronkite.
Many facets of the novel are pulled from reality and Joshua Wheeler’s own life; White Sands Ranch in New Mexico, the existence of a cult called Bible Study in La Luz; however, Wheeler’s author’s note in the beginning of the novel says it best, “Wash your brain. Start again. The characters are unreal. The places and events are unreal. All things in The High Heaven are figments of my—and now your—imagination.” Just like we see with his characters throughout the novel, the very act of listening, of watching, or reading makes us believe. Maybe just a little bit, the suspension of disbelief required for a story. But that’s a belief all the same.