This book will help you understand that, yes, you can study dog poetry, become the Minnesota Twins closer, run for president of the United States, become a Franciscan friar in Albuquerque, put oranges in a circle, teach courses in conflicting political theory at the University of Idaho, attend Mass literally underground in a subterranean cathedral hundreds of feet below the desert floor, play no pads tackle football on Boise State’s blue turf, write tracts while sunbathing at the top of Namur’s castle in summertime, discuss constitutional originalism while getting a back rub, and fight a lot, I mean tons, tons see: a cornucopia, no, a plethora, nay, an overabundance, of bad, super, super bad guys bent on well...yes, the, yeah, the standard take over the world and rule everyone thing, you know, that, but, wait, but this time:
nuclear weapons are not subtexted background chatter but out in the open
and this time:
you get to travel to Illinois, Italy, and Iceland’s Blue Lagoon in one footnote
and this time:
the main love story isn’t some stock photo, twenty something couple in a penny dreadful Saturday afternoon movie you watch with a lukewarm latte on a well-worn couch in Lower Manhattan your spirits lower than the elevation itself. No, here it’s a 60-something power couple, she extreme left, he extreme right, they, together, perhaps more explosive than the bombs themselves.
This book will help you understand that you can do, or, at least try to do, or, failing that, with one-hundred percent certitude, read about others doing these things. You have free will, do you understand that? Of course, this also means that it is your fault. Don’t add to your long list of mistakes by missing this book.
For Thermonuclear Mirth is unique on the fiction landscape, Catholic and otherwise, today. In an age where "fiction" invariably means dragons, knights, ladies and endless webs of fantastical fakeries, one will not find a single example of such things in this book. Thermonuclear Mirth is a wholly fictional book of real life in the future, a future as it might become, not as it can never be, with a persistent question of what can be done in response, by applying eternal truths, running from cover to cover.
The book is at times sincere, at times absurd, at times extremely absurd; it will make you cry, laugh until you cry, inspire you to learn at least one foreign language, and make you feel guilty, and ashamed, if you cannot do ten pull-ups, jump up and touch 9 feet, and run a respectable mile; it is at times profane, vulgar, and base, but, unlike scores of books for whom those markers are the goal as well, here such things are only present so as to show the horrid reality of sin so as to lead readers to a clearer, and long lasting, appreciation of the narrow path towards the Good, the True, the Beautiful. The "reality of sin;" so too the reality of beer, politics at Thanksgiving dinner, Rottweilers, Lake Zurich, Rhode Island Red Hens, ad infinitum. This because Thermonuclear Mirth is a book about real life; the messiness of it, yes, down to the very bottom of the well; but the hope, rather the surety, of solutions to the messiness and a path to authentic happiness.
Gracjan Kraszewski is the author of five books: the novel "Thermonuclear Mirth," the novella "Seraphim and the Dust Plague," and the book of essays "The Hippo Lectures"-all from Arouca Press-along with the novel "The Holdout" and the Civil War history "Catholic Confederates." Holder of a PhD in history (from Mississippi State University) he has taught, and teaches, at universities in the Pacific Northwest and Midwest. He played baseball in college, professionally in Europe in the Czech Republic and Belgium, and for the Polish National Team.
