Gentle Spirits by Thomas Ford Conlan

Review by Mack Hassler

                                                    “…the novel is reflecting upon its own nature”
Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, 1963

Book cover for "Gentle Spirits" by Thomas Ford Conlan. Features a rugged, reddish-brown mountain under a partly cloudy sky with a visible moon. The title and author's name are in bold black letters.Gentle Spirits, this first book-length offering by Conlan, a retired shipmaster and poet, is not exactly an “Anti-Novel” in the tradition that Sartre describes above.  It does not use the romping and funny parody that Cervantes and Sterne and Flaubert use; but what he does do is give us chapter arrangements that are more character-driven rather than plot-driven.    This means that the reader must sort out the chronology and plot more by himself or herself than in the usual realistic story.   Conlan’s real topics are a family history and the geography of America from the East Coast North and Westward.  Clearly the “gentle spirits” of his title are colored by the dynamic geography in our Nation as he begins with a chapter set near Iron River in our region of Upper Michigan.   It is an exciting, though difficult, read.   Conlan demands a lot from his reader.  I think the result is well worth the effort.

For some reason, Conlan opens in chapter one with the character of the Scot father who is left with a baby in the midst of winter in the woods near Iron River in Iron County of the UP.  The mother has just birthed “Samiuel.”  She insists on that name because of her memories of her Black grandmother reading scripture to her after rescuing her from a hurricane striking the barrier islands off South Carolina.  Samuel is the prophet (young man to be a prophet) called in the night by God, and so a magic name for Angelique nearly called except for her female ancestors and God’s prophecies.  The nation of his family (our nation) and life itself will hang by a thread and God’s Grace.  This opening is not terribly funny, but still a key irony.

The American family begun in this way and with its implicit ancestry as I read the story is not, I think, a celebrity family—neither are the family of Don Quixote, nor the Shandys of Sterne, nor even the Bovary family (though they are elite aristocrats.   Yooper baby Samuel survives his first rough UP winter and learns from his resourceful Scot Dad to be a fine fisherman and skilled trapper, just as the original Hebrew Samuel was a skilled court politician and prophet of the Torah.   The High Priesthood that God ordains to foster his chosen Hebrews, also, knows its world well until the highest Priest of all, God’s own son is offered as a sacrifice to overcome death for us all,   Similarly, for Conlan the American nation with all its wonderous geography represents its own “chosenness” in the developing chapters of his tale   Finally it is a patriotic American novel with a common family and uncovered through spectacular geography.

I cannot describe in this review each character introduced in more than two dozen chapters. The family does emerge chapter by chapter across the geography East to West just like the nation did from the seedling we see in chapter one planted in the Northwoods winter by the Black South Carolinian Angelique and the Scot Firestone distinguished both for their struggles against the winds of Atlantic Hurricanes and UP Blizzards.   Though he took creative writing courses in college, Conlan was employed most of his life as a captain of ships.  He selects a great ship epigraph for this “Anti-novel” experiment of his that I want to end with in this review.  The epigraph is from Einstein:  “A ship is safe in the harbor, but that is not why ships are built.” I think that in this strange book, Conlan sails rough seas well.   I recommend it.


Gentle Spirits by Thomas Ford Conlan (Legacy Book Press LLC, Camanche, Iowa, 2023) 251 pages, pbk, $17.99.

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