COLOSSUS

A small-town pastor harbors a big secret.

The fourth novel by journalist-novelist Barkan is upfront about its inspiration: The epigraph comes from Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter (1986), which introduced the chatty, opinionated American Everyman Frank Bascombe. Barkan’s narrator, Teddy Starr, is cut from similar cloth: A pastor in Pine Haven, Michigan (“the middle of the mitten”), he has a wife, three kids, a sideline as a landlord, and lots of ideas about right living (godly), proper rent payments (timely) and proper politics (MAGA-y). As in a Bascombe novel, the plot turns partly on a holiday; here, the town’s Flapjack Jubilee, which makes for some seriocomic riffs on parking, cellphones, and crowds. Teddy is darker than Frank, though, and his self-aggrandizement as a compassionate pragmatist doesn’t keep him from being contemptuously cold toward his teenage son when he learns the boy may be gay, or stop him being unapologetically unfaithful to his wife. (Even his pillow talk reads like a gassy, Bascombe-y op-ed: “No one hates more than a Democrat at a liberal arts college. No one burns more. No one aches for more blood.”) Midway through, just as it’s beginning to seem this Trumpy Ford variant has worn out his welcome, Barkan introduces a plot twist that unravels much of what Teddy has proclaimed about himself and how he turned into the preacher-landowner he’s so proud to be. In the process, Barkan strives to expose contemporary masculinity for the hot air it often is; unlike Bascombe’s largely benign riffing, though, here the suggestion is that it has an unmistakably toxic streak. Barkan’s shift into Teddy’s past isn’t entirely persuasive, nor is the aftermath of its revelation, but he ventriloquizes Ford well, and invents an intriguing if unlikable anti-hero.

A canny, twisty satire of all-American posturing.