A Satire With Heart
The second entry in Randy Boyagoda’s Dante-esque trilogy carries the reader through a rollercoaster of a purgatorial journey.
Review by Katy Carl
It isn’t difficult to visit Hell, / As long as you can follow the instructions.” –Dana Gioia, “The Underworld”
“Pity and tolerance” are rare virtues for a satirist to possess, writes critic John Cournos. Cournos notices evidence of both virtues in Gogol’s writing, but the same can be said of Randy Boyagoda’s satirical fiction—a fact which may reveal Boyagoda’s thematic inspiration as clearly as does his fourth and newest novel’s title. After all, Dante is often misread on this point: he sings to save sinners, not to condemn them. As Joshua Hren has noted, much of Dante’s Commedia is about the purification of the emotion of pity, which initially causes the poet to swoon with pain but, once transformed by divine grace, is able to support a panorama of salvific vision. Boyagoda’s work, too, speaks of that same desire to save—and of a vision of salvation’s possibilities.
Dante’s Indiana is the second entry in a planned trilogy, structured after the Divine Comedy—Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso. Where the first book, Original Prin, followed the pattern of the Inferno, Dante’s Indiana follows the Purgatorial path, an upward but complex spiral. Both follow a central protagonist, Princely St. John Umbiligoda, who, like Boyagoda himself, is a Sri Lankan–Canadian Catholic professor of literature with a wife and four children. The surname’s aural echo of “Boyagoda” comically references the resemblances between character and author—which, however, end there. The madcap adventures of Dr. Umbiligoda, or “Prin” to us, would raise significant eyebrows at any academic-conference reception, no matter how many glasses of wine had preceded them.
Because of trauma sustained in the course of his (academic!) duty in the first book, Prin at the opening of the second finds himself eligible for early retirement from his teaching position at University of the Family Universal. No longer exploring the nature of maritime symbolism, Prin is soon living in Terre Haute, Indiana, pitching the virtues of medieval Italian literature to an unlikely alliance of hard-nosed American businessmen, evangelical influencers, and critical-theory activists. The ensemble’s shared goal is to build a theme park based on Dante’s vision of Heaven and Hell, a park whose fictional atmospherics also draw inspiration in part from George Saunders’ now-classic short story “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.” Like Saunders’ before them, the antics of Boyagoda’s characters are as tragicomically uproarious as they are startling—and yet, as presented, also entirely believable. The plot delightfully follows Aristotle’s advice to prefer the plausible impossibility to the implausible possibility. What ensues is a genuine levity that lifts the reader over substantive plot points that, less sensitively handled, could raise a multitude of defenses. By lighthearted treatment of the truly ridiculous, Boyagoda earns the right to look with authentic compassion on characters’ serious sorrows.
This sequel lacks neither for clarity nor for comedy.
One central scene unfolds during a visit to the derelict regional theme park “Dizzy’s World.” Once a family wonderland, the park now serves as a waystation for drifting opiate addicts in search of jobs or highs or customers—or all three in one. As the research trip devolves into an escapade, it also leads to the revelation of a deep sorrow in one of the park engineers’ lives: Having watched someone dear to him be consumed by addiction, this character finds the experience isolates him from his community—an experience more redolent of infernal tales than purgatorial ones—even though many others around him could all too easily relate to it. His wife finds connection only among “all these people on Facebook she’s friends with from all over the place, all going through the same thing. We can’t talk to our neighbors about what’s happened, but we can talk to people way up in Michigan and Maine.” Becoming able to confront the problems of community within that same community, rather than merely complaining about them to others experiencing similar problems at a serious geographic distance, is a key dynamic in this character’s arc toward redemption. That said, the novel also gives time to the problems of building community in a geographically gargantuan nation, though the subplot around this is too complex to do real justice here.
Prin’s modest goals in this story—to help the Dante’s Indiana theme park project succeed so that he can earn enough money to restore his dilapidated Toronto home, win back his wife’s trust, and return to the secure stasis of family life—contrast with the drastic depths of his needs for personal and career survival in the events of Original Prin. Precisely because his investment is less a life-or-death proposition than it was in the first entry in the trilogy—less desperate though no less closely observed—the story’s complications are also more elaborate, the throughline of the plot less direct. Even so, this sequel lacks neither for clarity nor for comedy: Page after page, Prin’s narration drops laugh-lines at the rate of a professional stand-up comedian as an increasingly baroque series of entanglements crop up to thwart his much-desired reunion with his family. Each complication is more delightfully absurd, each farther from the quotidian than the last, and yet every new stake strikes closer to certain emotional heartlands of American story: the impossibility of ever being fully present where you are when your heart is somewhere else; in what senses we do, and in what senses we do not, have a home in this world; how we can claim to offer liberty and justice for all when some never fully feel the equality of treatment that, at its best, the American national character proposes.
That “best,” deeply necessary as an ideal, is in practice so rarely on offer—especially, as Walker Percy had it, in our “Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing latter-day USA”—that we might be forgiven for wondering what can possibly be done about our shared problems and what, if anything, literature has to do with the shared solutions. In a forthcoming interview with Dappled Things magazine (which I edit), Boyagoda discusses the potential diagnostic function of literature with interlocutor Jeffrey Wald and opines that “when the novel becomes prescriptive, things go badly, but to the degree that a novelist can capture or notice things, and help a reader understand something larger about the moment we are in, that’s a good thing.” Dante’s Indiana fulfills this desideratum.
Lest the mood grow too somber at novel’s end, Boyagoda wisely keeps the commentary to a minimum, the pace of events crackling, and the comic callbacks to previous jokes flowing. Lest hope itself seem too strenuous, he allows the reader the resolution of Prin’s individual comedy. Yet he does not shy away from the difficult, unresolved realities of the community Prin leaves behind in Terre Haute: Without the privileges or resources Prin enjoys, these families too must find ways to return to each other, forgive, heal the wounds of the past, and move forward. How will they do this while the world around them is burning? Boyagoda’s narrative responses are surprising, even jarring, as they balance on the edges of some terribly fine distinctions. Near the ending an estranged character is welcomed back to the tune of a conversation that, to many of us, will ring too familiar:
“She’s come home.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On what home’s like.”
Well. What is home like, when entering into debate on the serious questions can at times feel like a glimpse into the Inferno? And what of those who cannot leave where they are to find their resolution waiting for them elsewhere? Boyagoda’s comic wit turns these questions back squarely on the reader, where they belong.
Katy Carl is editor in chief of Dappled Things magazine and author of As Earth Without Water, a novel (Wiseblood Books, 2021). She is a senior affiliate fellow of the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society through the University of Pennsylvania and is currently pursuing her MFA in fiction at the University of St. Thomas—Houston.
