In Lives of the Saints by David R. Slavitt an unnamed journalist tries to come to terms with the loss of his wife and little daughter, Leah and Pam, in a car crash four months earlier. A former college professor, he now works for a tabloid newspaper, which thrives on the most absurd types of stories, with headlines such as "DIETER GOES BERSERK TRIES TO EAT DWARF", or "MAN DIES, REVIVES, 16 TIMES", etc. The chief editor gives him a job he feels he is not up to, but nonetheless takes: to write a series on the victims of a mass murder killing spree.

There are no logical reasons why the murderer, John Babcock, instead of killing the youths who crossed his lawn drove to the local Piggly-Wiggly and opened fire, killing a random six people: Amanda Hapgood, Hafiz Kezemi, Roger Stratton, Laura Bowers, Ambrosio Marquez Martinez and the three-year old Edward Springer. He makes visits to each of these people's relatives to try to find out more about them, specifically asking to see their personal possessions, which he gradually comes to see as relics.

Relics are all child's toys, which are holy things. Transitional objects, psychiatrists call them. They offer solace if not security and are reminders of a better time. p.91

and later, describing grief therapy the possession of a special object that links (...) to the dead person, such as a piece of jewelry... These objects are symbolic tokens jointly 'owned' by both the mourner and the deceased person. p.207

The veneration of the dead and their relics leads to a parallel obsession for saints and their attributes.

The deaths of Leah, Pam and the six victims defy logic. They are wiped out. Their lives were just erased, as if they had been pictures on a Magic Slate.

The absurdity of their deaths links the six victims to Leah and Pam. He manages to see John Babcock in prison, but can only confront the killer of his family, the drunk driver James Macrae in his dreams, which are rare anyways, as he mostly has sleepless nights. Perhaps in that dream he came closest to what one of the victims, Hafiz Kezemi, a devout Muslim, would call erfan a momentous insight into the "mystical knowledge of the true world," a mystic belief which proclaims every person a sign of God.

His search for the truth runs in circles, returning again and again to the philosophical works of Nicolas Malebranche whose seminal work The Search After Truth provides the philosophical and religious underpinning for the idea that there is no causality, and that everything that happens in the world is the will of God. It denies the logic of cause an effect, as well as the epistemology of common sense, very much like Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The more taunting, because Malebranche's philosophy supposes the inevitability of progress toward the general good. Man's inability to see this, his innocent belief in the senses, is the punishment for the Fall. Shame and guilt did not exist in the prelapsarian state.

His ramblings are not productive, and do not lead to a solution. They are more like the subterranean rumblings of the mind. Both the journalist and the editor are fired, as a new editor comes in and cleans up, to make for a new, better start. Eventually, that is also what the main character must do. Throw away old relics, make a clean slate and catch up on a new life, through hard work and love.

A difficult, but interesting novel. ( )