The High Heaven
A Novel
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A multigenre debut novel tracing one woman’s quest for faith across the American West during the Space Age
In 1967, on the night of the first Apollo mission, a child named Izzy is orphaned when the doomsday cult she was born into clashes with the sheriff in the high desert of New Mexico. She’s taken in by a struggling rancher who is trying to keep his mind from falling apart as NASA rocket tests encroach on his outer range. Inspired by the true story of a UFO cult in a village near White Sands, this novel traces Izzy Gently’s whole life: from tragedy on the ranch, through addiction and a rich cast of eccentrics in Texas, to New Orleans, where Izzy is haunted by her past even as she uses lessons from childhood to counsel people who have lost the ability to see the moon.
In The High Heaven, Joshua Wheeler explores American piety as it mutates over the course of the Space Age, as technology changes notions of both humanity and the heavens. Shot through with the speculative while paying homage to three iconic genres—neo-Western, picaresque, and Southern gothic—Izzy’s life story becomes a mirror for the warping of manifest destiny and, ultimately, a testament to the human will to seek meaning from the universe.
Suffused with the absurdist history of American space travel and the wide-open landscapes of the Southwest, The High Heaven chronicles a larger-than-life adventure of one extraordinary woman who, despite tragedy, never loses sight of redemption.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The wandering protagonist of Wheeler's sweeping if diffuse first novel (after the essay collection Acid West) harbors a lifelong fixation on space travel after being raised in a UFO-obsessed cult in 1960s New Mexico. When the compound is raided by the sheriff over reports of a burned corpse in 1967, Izzy runs away. She's taken in by Oliver and Maude Gently on their ranch near White Sands, who offer comfort by telling her she can transfer her heavy emotions to the moon. Oliver already opposes the government for attempting to annex his land for the military, and when a uniformed Army chaplain arrives to deliver the news that their son has been killed in Vietnam, Izzy misunderstands his purpose and shoots him dead with the Gentlys' shotgun, then flees the area. Over the following decades, Izzy flits between jobs and eventually drifts to Louisiana and becomes a social worker. As U.S. space exploration reignites in the 2020s with the Artemis program, she's drawn to a series of clients who claim they can no longer see the moon, hoping to help them in the way Oliver helped her. Wheeler's languid pacing throttles the picaresque story, which never quite coheres. UFO enthusiasts might appreciate this tour through Space Age lore, but it doesn't have enough thrust for liftoff.
