Though LaValle earnestly excavates notions of spiritual truth through this plot, the text itself never feels heavy-handed or moralizing. The library’s founder, Judah Washburn, was a blind runaway slave who fled to the California wilderness, where a celestial Voice spoke to him, guiding him not only towards spiritual revelation but also a hidden cache of gold-the fortune upon which the library was founded, for purposes both scholastic and spiritual the Unlikely Scholar’s research is meant to limn the presence of The Voice in contemporary America, to reconnect to whatever divine truth Judah Washburn realized in those California hinterlands some two-hundred years ago. His cohort turns out to be recruits for a team of "spiritual X-Men" known as the Unlikely Scholars, and tasked with researching paranormal happenings from an endless supply of newspaper clippings retained at the nearby Washburn Library. The ticket takes Rice up to a cabin in the mountains of Vermont, where he slated to perform some nebulous task amid a band of equally confused colleagues-all African-Americans, all with histories as criminally unfortunate as Rice’s own. Rice is a bus-stop janitor with a shadowy past and a mostly-kicked junk habit, and he gives himself this advice in response to receiving a cryptic envelope with a Greyhound ticket and a post-it note: "You made a promise in Cedar Rapids in 2002. "Make peace with a little mystery," suggests Ricky Rice, protagonist of Victor LaValle’s newest novel, Big Machine.
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