Gates of Heaven

In Gates of Heaven, the conclusion to his sweeping, polyphonic trilogy, Glenn Arbery carries his God-haunted characters to the threshold between despair and deliverance. Along the way, he offers an unflinching look at the American soul. The year is 2020. The Trump-Biden election looms against the backdrop of a global pandemic. Jacob Guizac, kept from his senior year of high school in Wyoming by another COVID-19 scare, reluctantly takes on a monumental homeschool project assigned by his father's friend, Braxton Forrest: a hundred-page essay on Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. As Jacob yields to an obsession with Sherman's life and career, Forrest's oldest daughter in Georgia undergoes a marital crisis, and Jacob's father Walter succumbs to a case of Covid so severe that he's kept in a medical coma for almost two months. With the country in disarray, and families strained by illness, infidelity, and political divisions, Jacob's engagement with Sherman becomes intensely personal and contagious as he uncovers the religious contention within Sherman's own family and speculates about his decision to direct a war of destruction against the civilian population of the South. Sherman becomes a touchstone for contemporary America. In the cosmic scope of Gates of Heaven, Arbery shows us that time's linearity is an illusion and challenges us to reckon directly with the revelations that erupt when crises converge. PRAISE FOR GLENN ARBERY'S FICTION "a marvelous fusion of Gabriel García Márquez with William Faulkner." -R.R. Reno, Editor of First Things "Glenn Arbery's Boundaries of Eden is many things: a book of generations; an intertextual tour de force; an anatomy of desire (sacred and profane); a corridor of horrors; a promise of hope. It offers an unflinching assessment of the postmodern present and frank acknowledgement of our shared, often malignant past. This is a fully-realized contemporary novel situated in the Grand Tradition." -William Bedford Clark, author of The American Vision of Robert Penn Warren