There are mysteries here in both the mundane and the miraculous sense. When the mysterious man they all call “the Dean,” takes Ricky into his confidence and shares a terrible secret about one of the former scholars, Ricky begins a search that will reveal his destiny and the dark heart of faith. The purpose of the Unlikely Scholars’ work is obscure at first, but one of Ricky’s colleagues, a former meth addict named Violet, discovers their calling and shows the others what they need to do and how to build on the work of previous scholars. All of the Unlikely Scholars are black, which is significant because the library was endowed by a blind runaway slave named Judah Washburn, who stumbled across a fortune and then was guided across country by a supernatural Voice he never heard again. Time to honor it,” Mystified by the message and shamed by the secret guilt he carries, Ricky is no wiser when he finds out he’s one of a half-dozen “Unlikely Scholars” who have been brought to Vermont to work at the Washburn Library. Ricky Rice is a 40-year-old African-American working as a janitor at a Utica bus station when he is summoned to Vermont by a few cryptic words on a Post-it note attached to a bus ticket: “You made a promise in Cedar Rapids in 2002.
This is a story that has depth, richness a heart and a soul. Not that you can pigeon-hole this novel-it’s a dizzying slipstream mashup of genres and memes and tropes and legends wrapped around a cross-cultural love story.
The Big Machine is what urban fantasy looks like when it’s grown up and the writer isn’t relying on paranormal clichés to flesh out an epic tale of good versus evil. Big Machine: A Novel by Victor LaValle Spiegel & Grau, 384 pp.
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