Reinventing the Apocalypse

Writing on the Bookslut blog, Guy Cunningham argues that Salvation City by Sigrid Nunez (who visits the Writers Institute today) reinvents the "Post-Apocalyptic Novel."....

"Salvation City repudiates its own genre -- because the 'apocalypse' of this post-apocalyptic novel isn’t the end of the world. And it’s this that separates Nunez’s novel from The Road or Stephen King’s The Stand (which also centered on the aftermath of a flu outbreak). Cole is interested not in surviving, but in living. And as a result, his story is really about a young man’s efforts to navigate two homes: that of his parents -- secular, intellectual, tumultuous -- and that of Pastor Wyatt and Tracy in Salvation City -- religious, focused on homeschooling, serene. It’s to Nunez’s credit that this conflict is far more engrossing than the apocalypse that sets it in motion."