New West Book Review

James Gaitis’ “The Nation’s Highest Honor”

By Traci J. Macnamara, Guest Writer, 5-15-09

The Nation’s Highest Honor
By James Gaitis
Künati, 256 pages, $22.95

James Gaitis’ new novel, The Nation’s Highest Honor, begins in a place where you wouldn’t expect to find one of the nation’s most respected figures.  It begins in a place where you wouldn’t expect to find much of anything: the desert.  But Tucson-based Gaitis undoubtedly knows his own Sonoran Desert well enough to turn its sun-scorched scenes into the location of his solitary main character’s retreat. 

In Gaitis’ environmentally-rooted literary satire, a “windblown landscape cluttered with cacti and mesquite” is where the reclusive Leonard Bentwood lives out his days in a barnboard shack, mining the land for the raw materials he fashions into works of art.  From this unlikely location, Bentwood has been singled out as the recipient of the nation’s highest honor:  the Nolebody Medal. 

For fifteen years, Bentwood has lived in this “vast and weatherbeaten region of a dying and near-dead planet” without using a phone or listening to a radio or watching a television.  Yet most of his compatriots know him by name, and in light of a global crisis, the President has chosen him to receive an award annually conferred on a distinguished member of the population.  Previous honorees have included doctors and politicians and “a steady stream of other luminaries and dignitaries from most, but not all, echelons of the rich and not so rich but always famous.”

Leonard Bentwood has risen to fame in a world that has been vaccinated against the disease of violence.  No one on the planet remains practiced in the art of weaponry, and decades have passed since the last war.  The existence of such a world might at first seem wildly implausible, but Gaitis’ story is not so far-fetched.  When scientists discover that the anti-violence vaccine has a shorter half-life they originally thought, this crumbling utopia strikes a resemblance to the world we live in now.

Despite his reclusive nature, Leonard Bentwood has distinguished himself as an artist, but more importantly he represents something that the President believes is vital at this socially turbulent time.  Bentwood is a favorite of the working class, a people’s person, someone whom the President hopes can bridge a gap between the government and the governed. 

Uninformed of the reasons for his selection, Leonard Bentwood travels to the nation’s capitol to receive the Nolebody Medal.  Bentwood makes his way through the city’s crowds and burgeoning violence to appear at a ceremony designed to honor him along with a number of category award recipients.  But when Leonard Bentwood steps up to the microphone in front of a vast crowd chanting his name, he unwittingly sparks a chain of events far different from what the President had hoped for. 

This novel’s satirical elements add to its sardonic tone, and they set the stage for its stick-it-to-’em conclusion.  Gaitis’ wry sense of humor is evident especially in the titles he chooses for his characters, such as the “Assistant to the Minister of Cultural Affairs,” which applies to a bumbling sort of a man lost within the bureaucracy of his position.  And names such as “William Worthington” and “Member 5” are rich with significance. 

Thematically, the words “nobody” and “Nobody” echo throughout this book.  The proper noun “Nobody,” in fact, has been banned from use due to its associations with political resistance.  Gaitis, therefore, makes no mistake in naming the nation’s highest honor the “Nolebody Award,” and then awarding it to somebody like Leonard Bentwood.  The award’s connotations become obvious when Bentwood—with his vision slightly blurred—looks at a banner he sits beneath and misreads it as:  “Twenty-Fifth Nobody Awards Ceremony.”

Gaitis sets The Nation’s Highest Honor just far enough into the future that readers can still identify with its characters.  This world is one in which tropical forests have disappeared and biotechnology has altered social consciousness.  But we recognize the impulse in these people trying to make something of themselves and to honor those who have. 

Less understandable are the motives behind Bentwood’s retreat and the President’s decision to award him the nation’s highest honor.  Early on, readers may wonder why Leonard Bentwood has chosen to divorce himself from society.  And even though readers may accept him as a “cultural icon of the world,” the President’s plan to restore social order by bringing him into the limelight may seem unlikely. 

Despite these weaker areas in the plot’s development, The Nation’s Highest Honor still sings, largely due to its political edginess and its treatment of natural spaces.  One standout section begins simply: “It is moments before true dawn.” Within a few sentences, Gaitis takes his readers through the transition from darkness to light.  By the time the sun “breaches the sky with a narrow sliver of intensity,” readers will feel themselves transported into this place, watching in awe as “the desert is flooded…with a brilliantly searing light.”

It is obvious that James Gaitis knows intimately the landscapes he creates, and such a connection allows his writing to wrap readers into scenes full of depth and color and light.  Moments such as these are what readers will cling to long after they’ve turned this book’s final page. 

Traci J. Macnamara is a freelance writer whose writing has appeared in magazines, journals and books, including Isotope and Backpacker.  She lives in Vail. 

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