[REVIEW] Bloomland by John Englehardt

(Dzanc, 2019)

REVIEW BY DAVID TROMBLAY

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Bloomland, the winner of the 2018 Dzanc Prize for Fiction, explores the cyclic American cultural phenomenon of an all too real mass shooting set at a fictionalized southern university nestled in an evangelical stronghold where God and guns are routinely spoken of in the same breath and with the same reverence. Though the setting is masterfully crafted and given intimate nuance by Englehardt, Bloomland could also have the thinnest veil dragged across its pages and become Anytown, USA, all too easily unnervingly. Therein lies the first of countless gripping details waiting between the novel’s pages. Englehardt strikes at the unfortunately understood universality of this story by whispering to the psyche of the reader, saying, “this is what real endings look like, after anxiety erodes into routine.

This conversation—which has spent too much time in the mouths of talking heads following the week’s latest and greatest presumably unavoidable tragedy—is examined through the unfolding lives of a trio of characters including a student struggling to find a life of which they are willing to subscribe to, a widowed professor, and young man who is made listless by an emptiness and unknown yearning which he sets out to eradicate at any cost. The cost is interrogated by a trinity of narrators who attempt to talk the three characters through the descriptive, prescriptive, and speculative, events that led up to, unraveled during, and followed that fateful day.

“Later I understand you’re opening up to me, telling the story of your life like it happened to someone else, like the things you’ve experienced are not singular, but part of a cycle that is always repeating and reinventing itself.”

Englehardt employs these second-person narrators expertly while reminding the reader there is an “I” behind the tragedy to help usher the survivors who are left alive to move on afterward. Not doing so would be a grave mistake and no different than what America has been inundated with by the media following the endless string of mass shootings of recent history. By leading the reader through these knotted lives while using the “you” and “I,” Englehardt presents the question of who are “we” to sit back so apathetically and serve as an audience to what is quickly becoming history’s most grotesque spectator sport, leaving you to “…wonder if the scariest thing about all this is not that life can’t return to normal, but that it already has.”

It should not surprise readers that this book does not end with a cheery conclusion, but envelopes a meticulously scaffolded reflection of the current American society, one so willing to send thoughts and prayers when the time arises, yet simultaneously waiting for it to be their own turn, as if it is merely inevitable.

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DAVID TROMBLAY is a native of Duluth, Minnesota. He served for 10 years in the U.S. Navy, deploying to Iraq, Eastern Europe, and Africa. He is currently studying English Literature and Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Superior. His essays and short stories have appeared in Minerva Zine, The Nemadji Review, and Yellow Medicine Review. His first novel, The Ramblings of a Revenant, was published in 2015.