I remember celebrating my 50th birthday in something of a haze. There's something sobering about living half a century -- a sense of celebration of achievements and joys, and sorrow over disappointments, a deep sense that things could have been better had I made better choices. I suspect I'm not alone. Many of us can look back, even ten years, and realize we are in a different place than what we'd imagined.

Making the Ghost Dance is a tough, touching story of a young man named Peck. We meet him in his creative, but dysfunctional, childhood, and watch him as he grows into a conflicted and sometimes self-destructive adult. Attracted early on to magic, he hones his craft to near perfection, finding his way into celebrity and great wealth.

But Peck lives in parallel universes. On the one hand, he lives a life filled with celebrity and all the trappings of comfort and ease. But each encounter with life becomes an existential struggle for a man whose life is based on illusion. His quest for meaning, for continuity, is as elusive as his magic. With both feet firmly planted in mid-air, Peck journeys from childhood to old age with barely a clue as to why he's making the journey at all.

In a world driven by some elusive quality called "purpose," Peck emerges as an enigmatic figure whose lives and loves revolve around nothing but his quest for nothingness. His relationships are strained, his career driven by a sense of irony with a healthy dose of the iconoclastic. And the ultimate irony -- headed nowhere, he arrives somewhere, only to have no idea where he is.

Kranes' prose grabs the gut and squeezes, often leaving the reader feeling drained, nearly wilted. He writes about everybody, and about nobody. There is an ephemeral nature to his characters -- they seem to float above the story, if there's a story at all. And there's the rub -- this book is as impossible to classify as are the characters impossible to pin down.

But in the end, Peck emerges as sympathetic, almost human, and we, the readers, are invited to grow with him as his own self-understanding is blurred by the magical world in which he lives. Peck can move mountains, and yes, he can pull a rabbit out of a hat. But he can't find his place in the universe. And as his world begins to crumble around him, you fervently wish that he would emerge from his own personal hell, cast aside the sorcery, and live his life in what we blithely term the "real world."

Making the Ghost Dance is brilliantly written, a roller-coaster of events, emotions and ruminations about the non-meaning of life. So much fiction understands life as essentially linear, with a clear path from point A to point B. This book sees life itself as "one eternal round" -- the eternal second coming of one's past in a world that wants you to move on.

This is a wonderful book, and worthy of a wide readership. But this is not your mother's Mormon novel. In fact, on the surface, it isn't Mormon at all. Instead, the reader will have to eisegete Mormon meaning from the book -- not a difficult task when one delves beneath the clouds of non-meaning and see the chaos and unpredictability that is the experience we call life.

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Jeff Needle
February 21, 2006