Lyrics of the Crossing

In America, history and myth are forced to populate the same terrain. America is not an answer to impossible questions, but a result of their friction. We live on territory permanently unresolved between historical malpractice and millennial ambition. We're a myth constantly collapsing into actual atrocities--a dream with the power to kill. As we export our dreams for the world to consume, the world finds American sleep a fissile hazmat, its half-life longer than any Geiger counter could reckon. "And even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget / falls drop by drop upon the heart / until, in our own despair, against our will, / comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." Thus Robert Kennedy, misquoting Aeschylus upon the death of Martin Luther King, 2 months before his own assassination. This astonishing and very different novel, vast, visionary, and grieving, is ambitious beyond any we have ever published. It aspires to tapestry the inner life of our American experiment in its three threads of despair, wisdom, and grace. Despair: each individual trauma as a local case of our national pathology. Wisdom: the ineradicable record of our wrongs. Grace, the awful grace of god: a mythic disclosure that cannot lie, though it can destroy. These three strands, and their mangled topology, are Michael S. Judge's "Lyrics of the Crossing."