Synopsis "Heaven Help Us All"
In "Heaven Help Us All," novelist Moose Eliot looks at the organized violence we call war through multiple lenses. As the American nation lurches toward the Gulf War during the autumn of 1990, therapist Marjorie Llewellyn labors to help traumatized Vietnam veterans, while struggling with a tragic legacy of PTSD at the heart of her own family. Meanwhile Gary Devers, a refugee from the U.S. Foreign Service, faces the existential dilemma of a thinking man's response to the persistence of massed, armed confrontation against all reason, while pursuing a radiant vision of personal happiness with Marj. With war looming ever closer, Marj's mother must deal with the still unhealed wound of the untimely death of Colonel Llewellyn, a Vietnam-era bomber pilot, and the prospect of Marj's brother Bob's deployment, as a Marine reservist, to the deserts of Kuwait. Add the backdrop of the nation's capital, a tribal society of bicycle messengers, and the mysterious disappearance of Charles Pinckney, a model of PTSD recovery whose quirky acts of street theater speak simple truth to power, and you have an extended meditation on the tragedy of war, and on the consequences of its pursuit, insidious and pervasive, that none of us can escape.
