The Natural Order of Things
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Kevin P. Keating. (2013). The Natural Order of Things. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Kevin P. Keating. 2013. The Natural Order of Things. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Kevin P. Keating, The Natural Order of Things. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013.

Kevin P. Keating. The Natural Order of Things. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013.

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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Keating, Kevin P.
   • bioText: After working as a boilermaker in the steel mills in Ohio, Kevin P. Keating became a professor of English and began teaching at Baldwin Wallace University, Cleveland State University, Lorain County Community College, and Lakeland Community College. His essays and stories have appeared in over fifty literary journals, including The Blue Lake Review, The Fifth Street Review, The Mad Hatter's Review, The Avatar Review, The North Coast Review, The Licking River Review, The Red Rock Review, Whiskey Island, Juked, Inertia, Identity Theory, Exquisite Corpse, Wordriver, and many others. He currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio.
     
   • name: Kevin P. Keating

imprint

Vintage

publishDate

2013-04-23T00:00:00-04:00

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title

The Natural Order of Things

fullDescription

From a startling new voice in American fiction comes a dark, powerful novel about a tragic city and its inhabitants over the course of one Halloween weekend.
Set in a decaying Midwestern urban landscape, with its goings-on and entire atmosphere dominated and charged by one Jesuit prep school and its students, parents, faculty, and alumni, THE NATURAL ORDER OF THINGS is a window into the human condition. From the opening chapter and its story of the doomed quarterback, Frank McSweeney, aka The Minotaur, for whom prayers prove not enough, to the end, wherein the school's former headmaster is betrayed by his peers in the worst way possible, we see people and their oddness and ambitions laid out bare before us.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Robert Olen Butler
   • content:

     "A dark and utterly compelling work with an unnervingly resonant vision of our present age. Excellent work by a fine young writer."

2. • premium: False
   • source: J.W. Schnarr, author of Alice & Dorothy
   • content: "Reading The Natural Order of Things is like holding a tattered masterpiece in your hands-- individually the pieces are their own small works of art but the true brilliance isn't realized until you fit them together."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Michael Garriga, author of The Book of Duels
   • content: "Here is Kevin Keating, rallying against that tired old complaint, "Where are the new American voices?" He writes with verve, knowing, and wit--an explorer of the thin but deep fissure between privileged Jesuit school boys and the scrape-by world that surrounds it. Here, then, a wild exploration of the places and people that we wish we had the courage to begin. And now we can. Thanks to Kevin Keating's vision."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Barry Goodrich, Cleveland Magazine
   • content: "A darkly brilliant, sometimes disturbing odyssey that lays bare the human condition."
5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from October 15, 2012
     Keating toys with narrative chronology in this debut collection of interwoven stories that follows the lives of several “reprobates who have descended into... Hades.” At the center of an unnamed, ruined city of American industry thrives, tumorlike, a Jesuit high school and the Zanzibar Towers and Gardens, a flophouse where both students and alums slum it with prostitutes. In the opening story, “Vigil,” students have gathered at the Zanzibar to celebrate Halloween and the next day’s big football game with kegs of beer they stole from a senile priest in the final story, “Gehenna,” that was delivered in the second story, “Box,” by the father of star quarterback Frank “the Minotaur” McSweeney. “I’m counting on you. We all are,” says the Minotaur’s father, but the day of the big game, as in all the connected stories, we find out just how big a letdown everyone in this life can be. Story by story, the collection circumnavigates suffering—someone lights the homeless on fire at night; a merchant marine boxes up a man to ship him overseas; priests humiliate and shame their students, while one teacher loves them too much—in a place where most of its inhabitants “would rather gamble on a human life than try to save one.”

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     March 1, 2014
     Star quarterback, apostate priest, CEO, whore. They're a motley crew with a common fate in store: humiliation. Keating's dark debut offers a parade of characters but no plot. They live in a postindustrial city, a dismal place where feral dogs prowl the streets. A Jesuit school is all that remains of its former glory. The richly endowed school's attempt at urban renewal is a spanking new football stadium, but don't expect a full-bore satire about this deal between God's messengers and Mammon. Instead, Keating zeroes in on Frank McSweeney, the massive quarterback who will surely lead his team to victory in the game of the season, set for the Day of the Dead, right after Halloween. Doesn't happen. At a Halloween party in a flophouse, degenerate senior Will de Vere offers Frank, already drunk and stoned, a treat: the banged-up-but-still-feisty whore, Tamar. Next day, Frank is a wreck, the game lost, the season over. His humiliation is total but not worth dwelling on; Keating has many more victims lined up. There's the coach, forced to pay his flophouse rent by bedding his landlady, "this tusked and taloned tarn-hag." (Hyperbole is Keating's trademark.) There's Will's father, Edward, CEO and school donor, now facing bankruptcy. He's enjoying oral sex in a cab with Tamar when the cops arrest them; the fallen titan must then service his cellmates. Father and son will both meet grisly ends. There's no protagonist in this panorama of depravity, though the school looms over the action. Its priests are sinners too (their housekeeper is also their procuress), but only one of them is punished, the apostate Father Loomis, who has married off his most pious students to a bunch of prostitutes. "Life uses us as battering rams, one person against the other, and few...escape the catastrophe," comments the omniscient narrator, or puppet master. That's a rare philosophical observation in an overwrought work that puts sensationalism ahead of vision.

     COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from January 1, 2014
     The wrong reader who picks this up won't have to read long before hurling it across the room. Packed with depravity like a bloated corpse about to burst, the book could easily be written off as sadistic or hateful. But if you look at Keating's debut as a sort of horror anthologyno supernatural here, but plenty of monsterseach lurid shock becomes all the more impressive. (The fact that it takes place over a single Halloween weekend is our hint.) The book is arranged as a series of character studies that keep circling back over the same few events, with minor characters from previous stories graduating to the spotlight. Among them are Jesuit high-school QB Frank The Minotaur McSweeney, whose meltdown at the annual Holy War game kicks off the novel; Batya Pinter, the new English teacher out to bed every male she sees, regardless of age; and Tom Wentworth, a remorseless young sociopath toting kerosene and a book of matches. This is Peyton Place sunk a few rungs lower in hell, featuring the abuse of animals, prostitutes, handicapped children, and just about every husband and wife in town. Keating's prose, though, is serpentine and sinewy and all-around gorgeous; if Jack Ketchum had plotted Franzen's The Corrections (2001), it might've looked something like this.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

popularity

52

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shortDescription

From a startling new voice in American fiction comes a dark, powerful novel about a tragic city and its inhabitants over the course of one Halloween weekend.
Set in a decaying Midwestern urban landscape, with its goings-on and entire atmosphere dominated and charged by one Jesuit prep school and its students, parents, faculty, and alumni, THE NATURAL ORDER OF THINGS is a window into the human condition. From the opening chapter and its story of the doomed quarterback, Frank McSweeney, aka The Minotaur, for whom prayers prove not enough, to the end, wherein the school's former headmaster is betrayed by his peers in the worst way possible, we see people and their oddness and ambitions laid out bare before us.

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2. • code: FIC043000
   • description: Fiction / Coming of Age