Searching for Love in Cities of Death

“Things were not that simple anymore…”

“Postmodernism” is a difficult word, which can mean a lot of things. For French philosopher, Jean-Francois Lyotard, it represents the breakdown of shared narratives and values in the latter twentieth century. For American Marxist thinker Frederic Jameson, it is the cultural dominance of capitalism during the American Century. For German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, it is the hoped for period after modernity when scientific rationalism will be superseded by an anticipated new age of poetic thinking.

For many philosophers, we are still living in the postmodern age. For others, we are in a new period, a time often called “post-postmodern.” Like postmodernism, “post-postmodern” means many things. However, there is an underlying sense in the twenty-first century that we are living in a dead society. With terms like “Zombie Capitalism” and “Death Worlds,” there is the sense that we are no longer living in the ruins of a civilization that we once remembered, but rather that we are walking in a graveyard (often filtered through a digital lens) of a civilization that we have forgotten.

In his recent work, Blue Walls Falling Down, Catholic novelist Josh Hren presents a haunting portrait of life in the Biden Era. Blue Walls Falling Down is largely structured around the life of Stella Tęsknota, a teacher who is drawn into the orbit of Peter “P.C.” Clavier, a radical activist a la Black Lives Matter. Indeed, the radical apocalyptic politics of the 2020s is one of the key themes of Blue Walls Falling Down. Stella’s own father is drawn into a QANON / MAGA conspiracy movement as well. The odd union of “post-postmodern” black and white nationalism and radical politics dominates much of the contemporary social media news cycle as well as contemporary art and even scholarship—it is astonishing to see references to the “Alt Right” in books on seemingly obscure medieval and classical scholarly subjects. Blue Walls treats these realities, but not as the news cycle would. Rather, the book drills down into their root causes in the human heart.

Stella is bonded with the ancient faith by means of what Michael Novak’s called ethnic Catholics enclaves through her Nonna, her grandmother who provides bits of “Old World” and American Catholic neighborhood folk and religious wisdom to her granddaughter. A combination of Polish and Italian ancestry, Stella herself is the twenty-first century Catholic missionary to South Chicago, working at St. Cabrini’s school. Hren cleverly crafts the paradox of Stella’s missionary work. Working in a black school district seems to be the quintessentially radically left-wing act of virtue signaling, but serving the poor, including poor black Americans—as St. Francis Cabrini did—is the quintessential mark of a Christian. While teaching at St. Cabrini’s, Stella meets the celebrity psychologist cum black nationalist Peter Clavier.

In key with the rise of ethnonationalism in the twenty-first century, Peter Clavier focuses on fighting “color blindness” and elevating black national consciousness. At first glance, his rhetoric contains elements of the strength and pathos of Malcom X, but, in very typical twenty-first century, “post-postmodern” fashion, Peter’s oratory often deteriorates into parodic bombast. Still, Stella is overcome by Petter’s rhetoric, and she and Peter eventually have a child together (there may be a few passages in which readers with a more chaste muse might skip over), whom Peter, in very typical activist fashion, abandons for the “cause.”

When Stella returns home to Milwaukee from Chicago, her father, Regan, has joined the parallel of twenty-first century radicalism: the similarly outlandish New Right. Combining elements of libertarian conspiracies, QANON, and the Alt Right, Regan’s organization contains readers of Oswald Spenger and Julius Evola as well as doomsday preppers and neighborhood watch Baby Boomers. Like the radical left, the twenty-first century New Right is marked by large doses of rhetoric and paranoia. As Peter Clavier’s black nationalism sees American society as fundamentally oppressive and violent, so too does Regan Tęsknota perceive America in the state of free fall collapse and/or on the future of ushering in a left-wing totalitarian government. But while Regan’s interest in politics begins to wane at the return of his prodigal daughter, his friend Andy becomes more ideological, even as he develops a crush on Stella that will bring him into a climactic conflict with P.C.

One of the many things Blue Walls Falling Down is about is history—especially American history—always a strange subject for a people who can be so caught up in the present moment that they have forgotten their collective past completely. But in Blue Walls, several characters can’t understand themselves without reading their lives against their country’s history, something that culminates in an attempted terrorist attack on the Lincoln Memorial. Both the twenty-first century radical left and the New Right have come to view America as fundamentally bankrupt—the right seeing America as essentially vulgar, and the left seeing America as fundamentally oppressive. Even the figure of Lincoln, the great emancipator, has become an object of critique for both the left and the right—in the novel, Peter Clavier’s black nationalists point to Lincoln’s seemingly racist statements to discredit him as an honorable figure. Indeed, Blue Walls Falling Down is, to use a now dangerous word, a “post-liberal” novel, which chronicles what is like to live in America where much of the story of American liberalism is being attacked by both the left and the right.  

Finally, these deadly tensions between these two contradictory but very similar political worlds proves to be, in the novel, as in real life, ultimately, deadly. The novel ends with an apocalyptic confrontation between radical agitators and the police, and Peter Clavier is shot in a debate over Abraham Lincoln by Andy, an Alt Right agitator. Echoing Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange during his extended funeral speech, Peter Clavier’s pastor-uncle Minor C., discusses the mystery of God’s predestination and providence nestled in twenty-first century black American evangelicalism. Caught up in the midst of this battle is Stella and Jason, her son with a now-dead father. This is perhaps the core of the novel: the new American family caught in between the two crazed political serpents striking at each other. But a family is also a symbol of hope. It is a new life, which will form a new generation and a new world.

One of the key lingering feelings of the 2020s is that there is no future. Indeed, it feels as though we have moved beyond even the “Lost Futures” of the philosopher Mark Fisher, who held that those who came of age in the 1990s were promised science fiction utopias that never materialized in the twenty-first century. In our own age, it seems that we have even forgotten those promises. At the same time, this is not the first time in human history in which humans have felt there is no future. More importantly, as Catholics we know not to put our trust in human institutions and human promises. Political movements and societal chaos come and go, but amidst these fluctuations God’s prodigal love remains lavish: “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you” (Isaiah 66:13). Rather than some newfangled legislation or revolution, a mother’s archetypal love for her child points the way forward, however marked by the temptations and tensions of our time, hard though her life will be with a fatherless child.  

Blue Walls Falling Down: A Novel
By Joshua Hren
Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2024; 432pp

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