American Pastor

Ross Barkan’s fourth novel, Colossus, is a thriller. Arriving only a year after his longer, panoramic New York story, Glass Century, it carries on a keen interest in the counterfactual within American life, that is, the choosing of this path versus that, which can seem to define the individual American over and against history and ancestry. His protagonist and narrator is Teddy Starr, the pastor of Trinity Church in Pine Haven, Michigan, who has a wife, three children, and considerable holdings in residential real estate. He is by his own reckoning a “man of God and a man of land”, confident that his Creator wills his prosperity, his table at the steakhouse and the fundraiser for the local politician, and his tough, fair treatment of his tenants and family, who need frequent reminders to stay on the narrow way. But he has a past, of course, and for each of his achievements there is something or someone he has left unchosen on his way up to this happy perch with its views of future, further success.