Bathing the Lion by Jonathan Carroll

Published by St. Martin's Press on October 21, 2014

I didn't know what kind of book Bathing the Lion was before I started reading it. A quarter of the way in, I still didn't know, but that's a good thing. By the midway point I understood that Bathing the Lion is sort of a comedic science fiction novel with some elements of fantasy that makes some serious points about reality.

Much of Bathing the Lion is about the vagaries of memory, its unreliability, its tendency to reshape reality into something more pleasant. Bathing the Lion is also about transformative experiences and the impossibility of predicting what -- a book, a song, a person, an idea, a place -- will transform us. But by the end Bathing the Lion proves to be about humanity, about the qualities that make us human.

Dean and Vanessa Corbin are married, although they do not like each other much. Kaspar Benn, Dean's friend and business partner, who may or may not be having an affair with Vanessa, agrees that Vanessa is an unlikable drama queen. But she may also be a gifted lounge singer (and diva wannabe) who may or may not have saved Jane Claudius' bar from going under.

What begins as an ordinary domestic drama takes an odd twist when a little girl named Josephine tells Kaspar "everything happens today." She encourages Kaspar to find William Edmonds, a recent widower. Edmonds has been lamenting his inability to recall more details of his happy life with his wife, but (according to Josephine) the true nature of Edmonds' life has been hidden from him. Yet Edmonds isn't the only character whose true nature is concealed from the reader in the novel's first half.

Separating what is real from what isn't is part of the reader's challenge as the story moves forward. It is even more of a challenge for the characters as they encounter chaos, a force in the universe that seems unstoppable -- unless they can find a way to stop it.

Many people believe that they benefit from divine guidance. Bathing the Lion imagines that we receive interventions rather than guidance and that the interveners (who view Earth as something of a backwater) are less than divine. They're more like cosmic technicians -- they are, in fact, called mechanics -- although some behave less professionally than they should.

I won't reveal anything else about the surprising plot. It gains steady momentum as it moves along and eventually proves to be absorbing, even if I had the sense that Jonathan Carroll was making it up as he went along with no overarching plan to guide the narrative. I have often thought that every work of fiction is made better by the inclusion of a dog; the two dogs in Bathing the Lion contribute additional humor.

Molecules of wisdom float through the story, waiting to be absorbed, as do its humor molecules. The capacity for wisdom and humor are part of the human experience (the novel reminds us), as are generosity, hope, fear, sadness, and all the mortal emotions that blend within us. The cacophony of human experience seems chaotic but Jonathan Carroll argues that it produces a harmonious whole that keeps chaos at bay. Bathing the Lion is itself a surprising blend of literary qualities.

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