Novel resembles reality but underwhelms
Miracles Inc.
T.J Forrester
Simon & Schuster 272 pp.
Few people illustrate the old adage “truth is stranger than fiction” more reliably than televangelist preachers. Whether receiving a 50-year jail sentence for fraud filing a $10-million lawsuit against Penthouse or buying crystal meth from a gay escort their antics make it hard for any writer to imagine something more compelling.
Accordingly the failure of Miracles Inc. author T.J. Forrester’s attempt at this feat isn’t a huge surprise. Whatever its merits this story of televangelist Vernon Oliver simply isn’t half as entertaining as those of his real-life counterparts.
The novel told from Vernon’s point of view begins with him on death row for murder (though it’s not initially clear whether he actually killed anyone and if so who or why). Having set the scene Forrester spends most of the rest of the novel cutting back and forth between Vernon’s six-by-10 cell and episodes from his rise and fall as a young rabble-rousing Harley-riding “biker preacher” who claimed the ability to heal the sick.
The flashbacks reveal however that Vernon actually possessed no such power and was — gasp! — mostly in it for the money. But while this hardly sets him apart from other faith healers he’s distinguished from them by his apparent genius which enables him to “quote enough Nietzsche to bore someone into a coma” and “solve mathematical problems so beautiful they’d make Pythagoras cry.”
Actual evidence of Vernon’s stratospheric IQ however is pretty scarce in the novel (and its absence doesn’t seem intended to suggest his egotism). Certainly his likening the smell of prison meatloaf to a “greasy fart” is unlikely to make anyone cry at least not at its beauty. Geniuses might appear to make compelling characters but they’re hard to convincingly portray without being one yourself which leads Forrester to do considerably more telling than showing on this front.
Despite the author’s best efforts Vernon also fails to seem particularly charismatic even though it’s supposedly this quality that helped him rake in hundreds of millions of dollars. But he’s no less convincing a character than his boss Miriam a hard-nosed older woman he unaccountably finds sexy. The appeal of her estranged daughter Rickie Vernon’s girlfriend and later wife is a bit more explicit. In spite of her general moodiness and instability he loves her for her calm acceptance whenever he trounces her in Scrabble.
Although Forrester paints a suitably grim portrait of Vernon’s claustrophobic cocoon in prison his portrayals of most of the other inmates are laughably exaggerated. In an unintentionally humorous description of a mass murderer he writes: “Zach shot 17 people and killed five would have kept on shooting if he hadn’t run out of bullets. Needless to say subtle is not part of his character.” Needless indeed.
The main — perhaps the only — thing holding the reader’s interest through all this is the mystery surrounding Vernon’s crime which Forrester naturally waits as long as possible to reveal. When the truth finally emerges though it’s underwhelming and it’s followed by a ludicrous climax that completely ignores the realities of the American legal system.
The bigger problem though isn’t that Miracles Inc. bears too little resemblance to reality but rather too much. If it is indeed possible to top the real-life exploits of televangelists in a work of fiction it would probably take a genuine genius to pull it off.
