The men poised stricken. Their throats wanted to cry out and scream but didn’t dare. For a moment they were a petrified and straining pageant. Then the bottom of their world gave way. The building shuddered violently, her supports burst with the crackling slap of wooden gunfire. The floor vomited upward.
This scene occurs about twenty-give page into the novel and become the stimulating even of the entire rest of the story. The only film adaptation as of 2021—a 1949 British product retitled Give us This Day—actually climaxes with the scene, ignoring everything that comes after. Strangely enough, they are both equally effective for their different purposes in their own way. For the novel, the collapse of a building at this early stage is kind of like Psycho and murder of what seemed like the main character a third of the way in. The shock at the early exit of Geremio is just the first of many repercussions the building collapse engenders throughout the narrative. It is, in a strange way, the climax of the book as well as the movie, but from a quite different perspective. The linear progression is chronologically forward, but every significance event inevitably circles back to this moment.
And through the great door from which he had come out with napkin around neck of rich black cassock of his round body was a long table reaching away beautifully lit with slim candles throwing warm glow on shiny porcelain plates containing baked potatoes and cuts of brown dripping lamb and fresh peas and platters of hot food cool food hard food soft food…
The protagonist of the story turns out to be Geremio’s son, Paul. His mother is trying to get the worker’s compensation benefits she is entitled to as a result of his father’s death, but keeps running into red tape which is, of course, another word for corruption. Being the good Catholic son that he is, Paul undertakes to beseech the help of Father John whom, he has been told, wields some influence. The trip to the see the Irish Catholic priest reveals a man who is feasting in indulgence and then indulgently advises Paul—like a social media millionaire except, you know, he’s a priest—to convince his mother to seek charitable collections from the neighbors in order to help the family get through the severe financial crisis they face. Father John not only is personally useless, but he compounds the problem by indicating that in order for his diocese to entertain requests of charitable assistance, there must be first be approval by a board of trustees. Paul is set on his path toward utterly rejecting not just religion, but God.
Job would be a brick labyrinth that would suck him in deeper and deeper, and there would be no going back. Life would never be a dear music, a festival, a gift of Nature. Life would be the torque of Wall's battle that distorted straight limbs beneath weight in heat and rain and cold.
Job is not a character named after the Biblical figure, but rather a character constructed from metaphor. References to doing a job use a small “j” but throughout Job with a capital “J” is implicated as a god who named happens to be God. Work has replaced religion as faith to be worshipped in America. It is the American dream made manifest through the Protestant work ethic which is integral to living the Dream. That’s with a capital “D” as in American Dream. When Paul talks about and thinks about and dreams about Job, he is buying into the concept that all it takes to get ahead in American is working hard at your job. Fulfill that minimal requirement and Job will do the rest for you. It takes some time, admittedly, but he learns and eventually comes to know better.
