Every character in a novel has at least one emotional turning point in the course of the story, and for an author, that turning point represents a particular engagement between that author and their character.
Jeremy’s first turning point in the novel Jonathan Edwards occurs when he visits the Mennonite archives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He’s sitting on the veranda of the B&B where he’s staying during his trip, sipping a beer on a hot afternoon in August.
Two hundred Mennonites had emigrated from Jeremy’s birthplace, the Amish country of eastern Pennsylvania, to Canada after their neighbors shunned them because of their pacifism during the American Revolution. Their neighbors had made them feel they didn’t fit in; they were as foreign to the American dream as their language had been to English speakers. They had left Pennsylvania as a group, so they had each other to lean on, but they still had to build new lives from scratch while feeling the abandoned and isolated from people who had been their neighbors for all their lives.
Jeremy’s grandfather had been a conscientious objector during World War I, and his neighbors had misunderstood him in much the same way. Jeremy had gone to Canada seeking to understand a side of his Mennonite roots as well as his personal family roots, but he was going there at the same time that his lover Tim had travelled to Scotland, leaving Jeremy feeling his own isolation being without him and the loneliness that went with that.
Those emotions bring back the feelings of abandonment and loneliness that Jeremy felt after the death of his college lover, Ron, who had died in Afghanistan. Jeremy had never had the strength to visit the grave outside of Pittsburgh where Ron’s parents live, and that feels like his own abandonment of Ron. Is forming a relationship with Tim another abandonment of Ron, or is it analogous to the relationship the men in Winnipeg are building among themselves by coming together for dinner at the buffet restaurant in town?
That trip to Winnipeg represents a turning point for Jeremy in the novel. It links forward to the subsequent barn-raising that he and Tim participate in when they go to Amish country in Pennsylvania together. The simple farming of the Amish represents both the maintenance of close connections with the soil, agriculture and animal husbandry as well as the close-knit community of religious brethren. The subsequent trip that Jeremy and Tim make there, where both Ron’s parents and Tim’s parents join them and Jeremy’s parents a year later, bringing the story full circle. Amish barn signs link all the characters in the novel long-term, and they also bring Tim’s mother’s horse, Sox, into the story.
Tim comes to realize that Jonathan Edwards’ fire and brimstone can be damned, too.
