Review: 'High as the Horses' Bridles,' by Scott Cheshire

It seems an almost brazen thing to do these days: write a novel about a child preacher prophesying the end of times. But that's just what Scott Cheshire has done, and we should all thank him. Whether we're faithful or not doesn't matter, because we're all sons or daughters, and this ambitious debut is — more than anything — a testament to the sacred bonds of consanguinity.

Early in "High as the Horses' Bridles," Cheshire writes of a young boy: "He can never seem to hold his father's attention, not for very long anyway, and especially when it's not about worship. Even when his father does talk with Josiah … it's almost like the boy isn't there. At least this is how he feels, like his father is looking right through him, to some other place and some other time." These words echo on nearly every page after. Indeed, the whole of this novel is about the distance (emotional, geographical, spiritual) between a father and his son.

Josiah Laudermilk is the child prodigy who, on the cusp of his first great sermon in front of 4,000 congregants, can't catch his father's attention. Josiah's prediction that the world will end riles his audience for a moment, but ultimately sends his and his father's life into a spiral of doubt and despair.

The novel flashes from that opening scene in New York City in 1980 to the shores of Southern California in 2005. Josiah is in the throes of a failing marriage, his mother has died, his faith has been shattered, his small business is on the brink of collapse, and his father has become ill. Much of this sad story is told with humor, but it is also bleak. No doubt it would be easy to mistake the downward spiral of Josiah's life as a kind of nihilism, an Armageddon of the soul. But I think the author's aim is not so direct.

When Josiah returns to his childhood home and finds his father ruined, the story of their estrangement comes to the fore. And although it is sometimes painful to witness just how far the gap has grown between them, it is a testament to the author's storytelling gift that the novel never sags under the weight of its serious subject.

It would have been easy for Cheshire to end his novel with Josiah and his father finding their separate peace, but he concludes instead with a sort of epilogue that throws the reader 200 years in the past, to a tent revival in Kentucky. The final section reads with a special elegance, and the light from the far past shines even brighter on this fine novel.

Peter Geye, the author of "Safe From the Sea," and "The Lighthouse Road," lives in Minneapolis.