How do you love someone hell-bent on harming himself?

 I picked this up because Phil Klay, the author of Redeployment, said in an interview, “One of my friends, Scott Cheshire, wrote a beautiful book about faith called High as the Horses’ Bridles. Scott is not a believer himself, though he was raised in the Jehovah’s Witnesses and used to give sermons as a child, and the novel approaches questions of faith with the same degree of respect and serious consideration that any great believing writer would. It’s a challenging and provocative read.” It is that. 

A bio of Cheshire on the Gotham Writers site says that “in the back of every New World Bible (the official Witness translation), there are appendices that include maps and ‘scholarly references’ supporting a literalist reading of the Bible. Ironically, it was the inclusion of these references, designed to keep believers in place, that led Scott ‘astray.’ Scott realized how terribly flawed the so-called scholarly references were in that they merely propped up the Jehovah’s Witness agenda. He researched secular criticism along with histories of American Christianity, Mormonism, and Seventh Day Adventists.”

In college Cheshire found that even sacred texts steal. “Good writers steal or are at least influenced,” he says. “The writers of Genesis stole or borrowed from other religious texts.” He attended church less and less and even skipping the much-revered “Last Supper” celebration. Ultimately, he began exploring fiction, began writing fiction, published short stories, and earned an MFA in fiction from Hunter College.

High as the Horses’ Bridles is the story of a believer who stops believing, his father, mother, and ex-wife. The title refers to how deeply the blood will rise when God brings about the Apocalypse. In the first chapter, 12-year-old Josiah Laudermilk is a boy preacher speaking to an audience of 4,000 in what had been a Queens, NY, movie palace, now the sect’s church. Josiah, his spirit fired by the crowd, announces to the believers that in fact the world will end in twenty years, on December 31, 1999. 

Twenty-five years later, the world has not ended. Josiah returns from California to the Queens family home. He is divorced. He owns a shaky computer retail business. After growing to four stores, Otter Computing has shriveled to one with one employee, Josiah best friend Amad Singh, who keep the business afloat. His mother has died after suffering for several years with with the onset, remission, and return of cancer. And his father, Gill, has retreated into his faith, allowing the house and his health to deteriorate.

While Josiah has given up on the church although not (apparently) on his belief in God, his father has become obsessed with living by the rules of the Bible that mean the most to him. For example, that one should lie down beside the still waters means that Gill has moved a cot in the bathroom so he can sleep beside the filled bathtub. Everything that happens, happens for a reason. In a scene between Gill, Josiah, his mother and church elders, Gill says:

“I want to be a true believer, it’s all I’ve ever wanted out of life . . . And my wife. She wears a hat so you don’t have to see her shining head. For you! You think this is sickness? This is God’s work! All of it God’s work! All of them signs we are living in the End Days, and you won’t even see it. Look to the book of Matthew. In the Last Days. The Apostle Matthew says in the End Days one shall be taken, but the other left behind—”

High as the Horses’ Bridles puts us in the consciousness of white, middle-class American man who in his mid-thirties is trying to make sense of the world and his own history. Josiah does not debate his father or the tenets of his church. The novel does not question the inerrancy of the Bible’s stories, nor does it suggest that there may be questions about or inconsistencies in the stories.

The book does convey the difficulty of loving someone who seems hell-bent on harming himself in a mad quest for . . . what? Transcendence? Ultimate truth? Death? At times I found Josiah irritatingly indecisive. I wanted to tell him: Clean the damned house of the cat crap! Don’t let your father continue to live in such filth! Do something even if it’s wrong! 

Eventually, with the unexpected help of his ex-wife, he does. His friend, Amad back at the store in California, never gives up on him (or the store). And in an extraordinary coda, Cheshire ends the novel with a story of religious transfiguration in Woodford, Kentucky, in 1801. It alone is worth the price of admission.