A Review of Minor Indignities (Wiseblood Books, 2020) by Trevor Cribben Merrill
“I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways / Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears / I hid from Him, and under running laughter.”
—Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven, 1893
“[T]he mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse—that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.”
—Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 1945
Youth is more-often-than-not spiritually misspent, comfortably uncomfortable in a state of semi-permanent folly, and the denial thereof. Inordinate intellectual and personal development occur alongside, as if counter-balanced on a scale of justice, blithe extravagance, blissful arrogance, and the sort of ridiculous hedonism that appears sophisticated and transgressive only in one’s own mind. And yet, it was in those days when the world was small, and personal misadventures meant everything, that many of us also heard those terrifying footsteps of the Hound of Heaven for the first time. Perhaps in the voice of a contrarian professor, or a new friendship of a different kind. One is struck by the sudden, inexplicable desire to read a mysterious old tome by Maimonides or Teresa of Ávila, long languishing in the college library like a leper amidst well-worn stacks of The Economist. At British schools, Evensong services are always a stone’s throw away. Sometimes, that first extraordinary glimpse of the Divine arrives in the most ordinary (and fallen) of circumstances. Stumbling home from a late-night quad party, and gazing at the high-strung autumnal moon in all its eternal glory. Or in the hopeful but tragic eyes of a wayward lover. One of the great ironies of contemporary university life is that, try as they may (and try they do), the ruling clerisy cannot totally expunge the blithe youthful openness and blundering innocence that lends itself to the genuine intellectual and emotional exploration of religion.
These paradoxes are skilfully explored in an entertaining and instructive new fiction by Trevor Cribben Merrill, a young Catholic writer from southern California. On the surface, Minor Indignities (Wiseblood Books, 2020) is a handsomely written Bildungsroman that traces the exploits of Colin Phelps, a freshman at an unnamed Ivy League college (faint references point to Yale). Colin battles with alternating feelings of pride and inadequacy, obsessive infatuation, and adolescent ambition that will be familiar to any young person. Merrill also offers a subdued, yet powerful critique of the dangers of peer pressure, both ideological and social, within the modern elite university, and the troubling ways in which the progressive zeitgeist scrubs against the deepest longings of the human heart. At its core, it is a moving and relatable work of Catholic fiction, with deep-seated themes of salvation and redemption through the humiliations of youth.
The narrative takes place in the 1990s, back when a physical ‘face book’ had not yet evolved into Facebook, and the late Harold Bloom was still an active, stalwart guard of academic tradition. There is something timeless about a well-written campus novel, and the setting, themes, and characters herein will be eminently familiar to anyone who has stepped foot on a college campus over the past thirty years. Take, for instance, Colin’s partner in crime and roommate, the highbrow and womanizing Rex. His devil-may-care chain-smoking habit and obsessions with Deleuze and Derrida form an archetypical image of the progressive student rebel. They also guard a vulnerable adolescent, shielding fears of inadequacy with prickly layers of irony. Or consider the mousy, homely Julia, confident in her Catholicism. Her all-too-willing campus proselytizing masks deeper and darker unresolved questions. Then there is Margot, the objet d'amour of our protagonist, whose au courant tastes in literature and romance amount to little more than the unthinking acceptance of the latest New York Times bylines. Another familiar face is Professor Harry McClatchy, a silver fox and literary icon—a “Name” as Colin says, both admiringly and with no small hint of envy—rumoured to sleep with his doting female students.
These self-effacing, sordid characterizations are reflected upon by Colin himself, as an older narrator. Through these occasional musings, Merrill prods at the hypocrisies lying at the heart of the liberal cosmopolitan Weltanschauung, and the thoughtlessness of imitation. As a scholar well-versed in the writings of French philosopher René Girard, Merrill understands that personal transformation occurs interpersonally, through a process that Girard calls mimetic desire. We desire to become that which our peers desire, driven both by the desire to please, and by the innocent belief that what others desire must have some intrinsic value. Guided by the mistakes of others, we blindly pursue folly, for surely, they—our peers, professors, role models, objects of romantic desire—must be onto something. As mimetic desire is unavoidable, the liberal ecosystem of the university campus gives birth to the greatest of dramatic ironies: to each his own inevitably means utter conformity. Liberalism’s individualism can never be fully realized as it cannot fight the mimesis buried in our nature. Lock a community of ambitious aspirants and aging intellectuals in the same location, and inadvertently, they begin to think, speak, and behave in the same manner. As a result, a great danger arises when our models of mimicry, manufactured top-down by cultural and economic elites, contradict Man’s anthropology. Caught in a never-ending cycle of personal transformation to fit with the spirit of the times, we may quickly find ourselves drawn far away from our divine telos.
This is precisely what happens to Colin. At first shocked by campus culture, he quickly succumbs to peer pressure, and joins the chorus of faux-radical narcissism. His friends and professors are all drunk with “the stupidity of sophistication.” They mock and ridicule anything that smells of tradition and convention, preferring the safe escapism of French post-structuralism and virtue signalling protests. Religion, of course, has no place in this worldview. It is kitsch and conformist; the realm of uneducated “wage slaves” who mill about New Haven as faceless shadows. Monogamy, too, is nothing more than the “slave morality” of the milquetoast ex-girlfriend left behind at home. Merrill’s protagonist expresses such pride in beautiful prose: “My mind wanted to swallow eternity in some absolute conceptual insight; it refused to sink to the level of the bite-sized wafer at which the priest was now gazing with reverent intensity.” And yet, Colin is profoundly unhappy. Concerned only with fitting the culturally acceptable image of desire, he becomes a nervous wreck, always already concerned about the judgment of his peers. Had Colin been a student in 2020, the omnipresent fear of being cancelled would have driven such dread.
Girard teaches that only the Hound of Heaven can break the cycle of mimetic rivalry, alienation, and disillusionment. As St. Augustine writes in his Confessions, in perhaps the most beautiful prose of the Western canon: “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.” Gradually, Merrill’s protagonist comes to learn this paradoxical truth. The politics of the radical Left are nothing more than culturally laudable forms of ritualized transgressions, while its ethical practices leave one, at best, emotionally crippled. The true nonconformist is the man who possesses the timeless things. He who is sovereign over this world and the next is alone able to pierce through the noise, offering an otherworldly melody.
Merrill’s refreshingly honest tone is where the novel really shines, both as a work of art, and as an understated apologia. Profound lessons and cultural critique are gently peppered into a narrative that remains down-to-earth, unafraid to explore the levities, temptations and complexities of adolescence. One scene has the students sprawled in a common room, drinks in hand, watching a young Bill Clinton’s State of the Union address. Colin as older narrator breaks the wall, offering a moving reflection on those bygone years when capitalism was still our friend. In another scene, Colin and Rex engage in endless intellectual bickering—“quarreling over God”—and sauntering aimlessly from watering hole, to campus restaurant, to residence hall. Earnestly portraying “[t]he languor of Youth…the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews” (Waugh, Brideshead Revisited), this scene played out in my mind as a relay of my own freshman habits. Elsewhere, poetic descriptions of unrequited love, anxiety-inducing self-doubt, and the self-satisfying pride that so often precedes failure are almost painful to read. Lifelike also are the scenes where Colin grapples internally with his budding faith, first as an abstract patrimony, and then with increasingly personal revelation.
At any university today, students are torn asunder by competing familial, professional, romantic, and academic obligations—God is only glimpsed amidst shades of gray, and even then, often only in hushed whispers in the dead of night. Students from diverse backgrounds, with differing views and pre-existing commitments arrive fresh-faced on campus, and proceed to move through a cultural-institutional charcuterie factory that incentivizes the adoption of a homogenizing left-liberal, secular worldview. Believing themselves to be radicals, many reject the traditional structures of religion, family, and national identity that provide existential meaning, happily consuming a new “intellectual ethos of a select [cosmopolitan] clerisy, a form of consciousness without a mass base.”[1] Mere consciousness of the perpetually blaring siren song of mimetic desire—trumpeting the whims of corporate-backed mass media and avant-garde “woke” sensibility in a ceaseless “dictatorship of noise”[2]—requires the silence of a truly contrarian spirit.
And yet, the thread or glimpse of the Divine is always there, even, or especially, in blustering, blundering, youthful arrogance and ignorance. Merrill’s novel captures this bittersweet truth in all its complexity. It is there in the title itself; the minor indignities of adolescence are often where Grace first finds us, if we remain open. Merrill offers a moving story of one young man, who—amidst the tugging and roaring of neo-Marxist professors, campus protests and marches, untold alcohol-laden improprieties, and as-yet-untempered delusions—came to hear also the ceaseless footsteps of the Hound of Heaven drawing nearer. Until one day, He could no longer be ignored. It should be read by every young student searching for answers amidst all the noise.
Minor Indignities by Trevor Cribben Merrill (2020) is available through Wiseblood Books.
Jozef Andrew Kosc teaches Politics at the University of Oxford.
Footnotes:
[1] Pheng Cheah, “Cosmopolitanism,” Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 23 (2-3): 486 (2006).
[2] Robert Cardinal Sarah, with Nicolas Diat (2017). The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 32.