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When Heaven Strikes
F.E. Feeley, Jr.
CreateSpace, 2017

Imagine Dragons�� “Believer�� is the song that kept running through my head as I read Fred Feeley’s latest, powerful novel about love and pain and cataclysm: “When Heaven Strikes.�� So, when they make the movie about this, I get credit for choosing the theme song, ok?

“Not everything is a phase, remember that.��

A loving grandmother speaks these words to her terrified seven-year-old grandson as she rocks him in the aftermath of a terrifying brush with a tornado in the book’s prologue. It is an odd message, meant as much for the boy’s parents as it is for him, but It is a message the boy, Anderson, carries with him into adulthood. It is through the same grandmother, thirty years later, that Anderson meets Ted, a painter with a substantial local reputation, whom his grandmother commissions to paint a portrait of her garden in Indianola, Iowa, outside of Des Moines. The two men, in their late thirties, form an instant rapport, but each of them needs to negotiate the emotional hurts of his past. Both must be willing to risk the self-imposed, if comfortable, isolation of their lives.

This is a book that cuts close to the bone for Feeley. I’ve been waiting for him to write this, and I know something of its psychological and emotional roots. I was not disappointed, and once it gets past a little rocky writing in the beginning, the story pulls you in and ties you up in the lives of its three protagonists. A rich cast of secondary players amplifies the main plot threads, bringing them together in the narrative crescendo of the final drama. Eleanor, Anderson’s grandmother, is the lynchpin in the narrative, a warm, nurturing presence that influences Ted as much as it does Anderson. I particularly liked the fact that Eleanor is rich and socially prominent, not because that matters in itself, but because it suggests that such socio-economic power in the right hands can make people’s lives better. Eleanor is a force for good, and her garden is a metaphor for her big heart and her emotional courage.

Did you notice I mentioned three protagonists? The third makes a brief appearance at the beginning of the story, but doesn’t really draw our attention until the second half of the book. Jeffery is a Baptist preacher who first encounters Ted as he canvases the neighborhood with his teenaged son Josiah. Rigid and doctrinaire, Jeffery is all too familiar to Ted, whose own father was such an evangelical minister. But at first Ted knows nothings of who Jeffery is, not even his name: he merely takes note of the teenaged son and sees himself at the same age in the same predicament. It is Ted’s mildly silly brush-off of Jeffery’s door-to-door efforts that inadvertently triggers what will come later, when both Jeffery and Josiah become participants in the story.

“Wild as the wind is love�� appears on the cover of “When Heaven Strikes�� as a sort of subtitle. Love can be a violent thing; both as a strong emotion, and as a trigger for physical violence when it clashes with deeply-held prejudice or desperate fear. It takes no great mental leap to figure out that the wind, too, will play a part in this tale of love and its consequences.

I want Matt Bomer to play Ted in the movie. Just saying.